Chapter 16: Hands
She had told herself not to go near it until the test was done.
Lily stood with the paper cup Grace had given her, watching light move across the showroom floor, and the Aurelion One waited under its own lights. A car told the truth, her father always said. People had to choose to. She had built this one to prove him right.
"The Meridian is still open, if you want another look," Grace said beside her. "No pressure at all."
"You have been kind," Lily said. "Do people ask about that one?"
Grace smiled toward the rope. "Everyone asks. The Aurelion One. It is not really part of the lineup. It is more like the reason for the lineup."
"That is a good way to put it."
"Mr. Webb says it was built by hand. Eighteen months. One only." Grace lowered her voice. "There is a plaque inside. Staff cannot cross the rope unless Mr. Webb or Ms. Hart says so."
Lily looked at the dash through the glass. "For W.H.," she whispered.
Grace went to greet a couple at the doors, and Lily stayed, breaking her own rule one step at a time. Fourteen complaints in three months. One, written by a schoolteacher named Margaret Ellison, said a salesman had grabbed her wrist and moved her aside like furniture. HR had called it a misunderstanding. Lily had designed this test that same night.
A customer who loved cars would step closer. She did. She saw the rear panel seam she and Tomás had argued over for three days. She saw her father in every patient line of it.
"Sweetheart, the rope is not decoration."
She had not heard Derek Sloane approach. "I am behind it," she said.
"You are leaning."
"I am looking."
"Looking is fine from back there." He glanced at her coat, her jeans, her shoes, in that order, as he had all morning. "Up close is for buyers."
"And you can tell the difference at a glance?"
"That is literally my job." He stepped nearer, into the space a polite stranger leaves alone. "Grace would give a test drive to a parking meter. I am senior. When I say step back, step back."
"I have stepped back," Lily said. "Twice."
"Your hand keeps rising."
Her fingers had lifted toward the glass, honest and traitorous. "My father would have loved this car."
"Everyone has a story." His smile thinned. "Mine is protecting this floor from fingerprints, scratches, and people who get ideas. People like you do not touch cars like this."
Lily let the words sit where he had aimed them. "People like me."
"You heard me."
"I did." She moved one small step along the rope, because the light was better and because she refused to be herded. "Is that a plaque on the dash?"
His hand closed around her wrist.
It happened fast. Fingers, hard. A pull, not a guide. Her shoulder jerked, coffee sloshed over her knuckles, and her wrist was held by a man who sold her cars in her building, on the third morning she had come to learn whether the letters were true. The schoolteacher had written: He held on a second too long. Lily understood her now.
"Let go," she said.
"You need to listen when someone senior talks."
"Let go of my arm."
He pulled her back from the rope, one step, two, then released her with a small flick, as if setting down something sticky.
Lily looked at the red marks on her skin. She flexed her hand once, set her cup down, and kept her voice low and level.
"You should not put your hands on customers."
Derek laughed, loudly enough that Grace turned by the doors. "Customers. That is rich. Customers buy cars, sweetheart. You are browsing with a free coffee."
"I am a person standing in a showroom. That is enough."
"It is my floor."
"No," she said quietly. "It is not."
"What did you say?"
Above him, on the mezzanine, Marcus Webb came out from the pillar where he had watched all morning and started forward, hand on the rail, face white with fury.
Lily shook her head. Once. Tiny. Derek, still smirking, never saw it.
Marcus stopped. His knuckles blanched on the rail. She was grateful, and she was sorry, in the same breath.
"Nothing important," she told Derek.
"Good. Keep it that way." He straightened his cuff, pleased with the order he believed he had restored. "Grace can show you out after your museum tour."
"I will remember this visit," Lily said.
"I am sure you will. They all do."
Alone by the rope, she rubbed her wrist and looked at the One, patient and shining behind its glass.
"So will I," she said to no one. "Every word of it."
Chapter 17: Two O'Clock