"Your father told me. Three months before he died, he said a letter had come from Mason and he was going to respond, but he kept putting it off because he didn't know how to say what needed to be said and he was running out of strength to say difficult things." Dominic's expression did not change, but something in it acknowledged the grief that Evelyn did not show on her face.
"He didn't get to it. I'm sorry." Evelyn left the lower workshop and went back to her office.
She sat at her desk without removing her jacket. Then she stood up and went to the archive room on the third floor, a space that most of the current staff did not know existed, lined with flat files and document boxes and the accumulated paper history of a company that had once been small enough to keep everything in a single room.
She found the storage unit registered under her father's personal records. The combination lock was a six-digit number, her mother's birthday, because her father used the same combination for everything and had never once worried about whether that was secure.
Inside were contracts, correspondence, and near the bottom of the last drawer, a flat cardboard envelope sealed with tape that had yellowed at the edges. The return address read M. Cole and the postmark was three months before her father's death.
She opened it. Inside was a single folded page.
The handwriting was clear and direct without flourish. "I heard you aren't well."
"I don't expect you to respond to this. I don't expect anything, but if Evelyn ever needs someone who knows the GT system from the foundation up, I still remember every measurement."
"I'm not asking for recognition. I only want to know that the car is safe."
"The car deserves better than what's happening to it and so does the driver. M. C." Evelyn sat down on the floor of the archive room with her back against the shelf and the letter in her hands.
Her father had liked to say, when she was young and restless and impatient with detail, "The difference between a good car and a great car is not in the metal. It's in whether the person who built it was listening when they built it." She had never fully understood what he meant by that.
She was beginning to. She photographed the original GT7 drawing from the archive, the one her father had locked away separately, the handwritten set with the fine technical notations in the lower margin and the two-letter mark in the corner.
And she pulled the current engineering files and put them side by side. The modification Dominic had described was there in the original and absent in every subsequent version.
Three teams of engineers over 10 years had worked from the simplified copy and had never known there was a deeper document underneath it. Cameron had known.