Chapter 25
After the Prescotts' house went dark, I found myself spending more time in the garage than I had in weeks. Not working on the car, exactly. Just sitting in it sometimes, the way my father used to do when he was thinking something through.
My father, Thomas Morrison, had never been a man who talked about himself very much. He was a machinist by trade, a patient man, and the Mustang had been the project that defined the last six years of his life. We bought it as a tired old Fastback and rebuilt it together piece by piece in his garage on weekends. He taught me how to listen to an engine the way other fathers teach their sons to listen to people: for what is strained, for what is loose, for what is about to give out.
When he got sick, the car became something else. It stopped being a project and started being a promise. We finished it in the last good summer he had, and our final drive together is a memory I have kept carefully, and mostly to myself. He died seven months ago, and the car came to me the way his tools came to me, not as property but as something entrusted.
That is why the title transfer mattered so much to me, and also why it hurt in a way I had not expected. The paperwork was delayed in probate, a backlog nobody could hurry, and so the car still legally carried my father's name. To Diane Prescott, that gap in the paperwork had been a weapon. To me, it had simply been unfinished business, the kind of thing you get to when the grief lets you. I had never worried about it because I had never imagined anyone would stand in my driveway and use my father's name against me.
I thought a lot, in those quiet garage evenings, about why I had kept my job secret when I moved to Stonebridge Estates. It had not been a plan, exactly. I was newly appointed chief of police for Lakewood, and I had spent my career watching what a title does to a room. People either go stiff around you or start asking for favors, and neither lets you be a neighbor. I wanted, for once, to be the new guy on the street who happened to own a nice old car.
That instinct had nearly cost me. When Diane Prescott decided I was a problem, my secrecy meant nobody in the neighborhood could say, wait, you have this wrong. And yet I could not honestly say I regretted it. Diane had not backed down because she learned my rank. She had backed down because the facts, once on the record, left her nowhere to stand.
My father would have understood that. He used to say a man who needs to announce his authority probably does not have very much of it, and that real authority shows up in how you treat people when nobody is watching. I had spent my career trying to live up to that, and the weeks in Stonebridge Estates had tested it harder than anything in years.
I also thought about the car itself, and what it would mean to keep it here now that the fight was over. Some people might have sold it or hidden it away. I considered none of that for long. The Mustang was not the cause of what happened. A woman who believed she could take whatever she wanted was the cause, and a boy taught that wanting something made it yours was the symptom. Hiding it would have been a surrender, and my father did not raise me to surrender things that were mine.
So I kept driving it. Slowly, on weekend mornings, through the neighborhood and out onto the open road, the way we used to. And in the garage, with the smell of oil and old leather around me, I talked to my father the way people talk to the dead when they are alone: not expecting an answer, just keeping the conversation going. I told him the car was safe. I told him the street was quiet. I told him I had tried to handle it the way he would have, with patience first and the law only when patience ran out.
The garage light buzzed overhead. The Mustang sat there, red and patient, the way it had sat through six years of our work and seven months of my grief. It did not know anything about HOAs or police reports or viral videos. It only knew that it had been built by two men who loved it, and that one of them was still here, keeping it running. That was enough. That had always been enough.