"The young man's name was Mason Cole. He quit college, came here, and in 3 years designed seven engine variants."
"The GT7 was the last one. It was built for the 2017 season." Evelyn's hands were still in her lap.
"What happened?" "His wife died in a road accident."
"The baby was not yet 1 year old." Dominic's voice did not soften around the fact.
He stated it the way a man states a structural truth, because sentiment would reduce it. He disappeared, left everything on his desk and walked out.
Nobody tried very hard to find him, because the company was in transition and your father was already sick, and there was a great deal of confusion about a great many things. "And the drawings?"
"The original drawings, the handwritten set, the ones with his mark on them, were on his desk when he left. By the time anyone organized the handover documentation, they were gone." He did not say Cameron's name.
He did not have to. The direction of the implication was as clear as a bearing in alignment.
Evelyn sat with that for a moment. The air in the lower workshop smelled of metal and oil and the particular staleness of a room where ventilation has never quite kept pace with the work being done in it.
"He came back," she said. Not a question.
"He came back because he was worried about the car. The GT7 has a modification in the tertiary pressure assembly, a secondary seal ring that he added by hand before the first test run and never formally documented."
"Without someone who knows it's there, the system runs fine for years. Then it doesn't." Dominic folded the wrapper around the remainder of his lunch with the same care he applied to everything.
"He heard somehow that the car was struggling. So he came back as a maintenance worker, no name anyone would recognize, no claim, just to be near enough to fix it when it needed fixing." Evelyn was quiet for a long time.
Then, "He wrote to my father." "I know." She looked at him sharply.