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They Laughed at the Single Dad's 30 Year Old Mustang — Then He Bought 25 Cars Before Lunch

They Laughed at the Single Dad's 30 Year Old Mustang — Then He Bought 25 Cars Before Lunch

Chapter 2

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That Tuesday, he dressed in khaki trousers and a plain button-down shirt, poured coffee into a travel mug, and walked through the side door into the garage where a 1996 Ford Mustang GT waited in the half-dark.The paint had gone slightly chalky at the roof edge after three decades of Tennessee sun and humidity. The driver's seat bore a clean seam where Graham had restitched the leather himself three winters back, using a kit Norah had ordered from a restoration catalog the year before she was diagnosed. The radio still had a slot for cassettes.The engine, however, was another thing entirely: every gasket, hose, and bearing either original and immaculate, or replaced with a better part than the factory had ever fitted. And the idle that answered the starter settled into the low, even rumble of something old that had been cared for so well it refused to age.He had bought the car with Norah the year they married at a small lot in East Nashville, and they had spent three weekends in their first rented garage pulling it apart and putting it back together better than it had been. The car was not old; it was finished.He let it warm for two minutes, then called his daughter.Paige Keen was twenty years old and studying industrial design four hours south. She answered on the second ring and asked, with the particular exasperation of a young woman who had raised this exact point before, why he wasn't taking one of the company SUVs to a meeting at a luxury dealership.He gave her the same answer he always gave: a business partner who couldn't treat him with basic respect before knowing what he was worth had already told him something essential, and he wanted to hear it before he signed anything worth millions of dollars.Waypoint had recently won a three-year transit services contract from the city of Belridge and a regional technology consortium. And the first operational phase required 25 vehicles: 18 premium sedans and seven executive SUVs, all branded, insured, and deployment-ready before noon that same day to preserve fleet pricing and the 48-hour delivery window.Sterling Crest Automotive Group had submitted the most competitive bid and had the network to fulfill the order. On every spreadsheet prepared by Avery Sloan, Graham's chief financial officer, Sterling Crest was the obvious choice. What no spreadsheet had measured was the thing Graham had come to measure himself. He called it the lobby test: walk into a potential partner's facility looking like nobody important and watch what happens before they know your name.
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They Laughed at the Single Dad's 30 Year Old Mustang — Then He Bought 25 Cars Before Lunch

16 Part