Chapter 2
Before there was a house in Stonebridge Estates, before there was a badge with my name on it, there was a garage with two men in it and a car that did not run.
My father, Thomas Morrison, bought the Mustang in the spring of the year I turned forty-two. It was a 1967 Ford Mustang Fastback GT, Candyapple Red over black, with a 390 V8 under the hood. It was not a show car. It was a project car, which is a polite way of saying it needed everything. The paint was tired, the interior was torn, and the engine turned over with the reluctance of something that had been sitting too long in someone else's barn. My father walked around it twice, opened the driver's door, sat down, and put both hands on the wheel like he was shaking hands with an old friend.
"We can bring her back," he said. "Six years, give or take. You in?"
I was in. For six years, almost every Saturday, we were in that garage together. We rebuilt the engine bolt by bolt. We chased down original parts, argued about paint codes, and learned the difference between doing a job right and doing it twice. My father had a rule: if you are going to curse at a bolt, you have to apologize to the car afterward. He said it with a straight face every time, and I believed him every time.
The Mustang was the last thing we built together. It was not the only thing — there were fences and decks and a kitchen remodel that took two summers — but it was the one that mattered most, because it was the one where we talked the most. In that garage my father told me things he never said at the dinner table: about his own father, about the mistakes he made when he was young, about what he hoped I would do with my life. The car became a place where we kept our conversations.
Seven months ago, cancer took him. It moved fast, faster than any of us were ready for, and by the end he was too weak to walk out to the garage. On one of his last good days, he asked me to roll the garage door up so he could see the Mustang from his chair in the driveway. He looked at it for a long time and said, "She's yours now, Jack. Take care of her, and she'll take care of you." Those were close to the last clear words he said to me about anything.
The car is mine. It says so in his will, plainly and without argument. But the title — the piece of paper the state cares about — is still in his name. After he died, the inheritance transfer got caught in a probate backlog, and seven months later it is still pending. The clerk at the county office told me it was routine, that these things take time, that I should not worry. I did not worry. I had the will. I had the death certificate. I had six years of Saturdays and a garage full of photographs to prove whose car it was. The paperwork would catch up eventually.
I remember one Saturday in particular, near the end of the restoration, when we spent four hours on a single stubborn bolt under the chassis. My father lay on his back on the creeper, I held the light, and neither of us would quit. When it finally broke free, he laughed so hard he had to sit up, and he said, "See, Jack? Patience beats muscle every time." That line stayed with me. It stayed with me through every hard case I ever worked, and it would stay with me through what Diane Prescott was about to put me through, though I did not know that yet.
That is what I believed when I moved to Stonebridge Estates. I believed a delay was just a delay, and that no reasonable person would look at a man standing in his own garage next to his own father's car and decide it belonged to someone else.
I was wrong about that, too. But I did not know it yet. On move-in day, all I knew was that the Mustang was home, my father was gone, and the red paint in the morning sun looked the way it had looked on the day we finally rolled it out of the garage together, finished, both of us grinning like kids. I parked it, covered it with a soft cloth, and went back to unpacking boxes, thinking the hardest part of starting over was behind me.