He put it in her bag. He called up the stairs that breakfast was ready. He heard her thundering down and watched her come through the kitchen door with her hair only half brushed and her backpack hanging off one shoulder. And she looked at him with the alertness she had in the mornings when she was paying attention. "Something happened," she said.
The report came. She stopped by her chair. "The good kind of something? " "Yeah. " He managed to say it steadily. "The good kind. " Yet, Emma sat down and pulled her cereal bowl toward her and said, without making a big thing of it, "Good. " Then she poured her milk and ate her breakfast and Cole stood at the counter drinking his coffee and neither of them said anything else about it, which was its own kind of moment, the quiet understanding between two people who had been carrying something together without fully saying so. He drove her to school.
On the way back, he called Victoria. "Report's here," he said. "I got it 20 minutes ago. " Her voice was already in motion. "I've called Dana. She's contacting Stratton Group for comment this morning.
That starts the clock. " "48 hours. " "Maybe less if they move fast. " "I need you to bring the car to Phoenix today, Cole. I have a secure storage facility, climate-controlled, alarmed, monitored. It needs to be out of your shop before their legal team starts looking at options. Cole had expected this and had already been thinking about how to manage the logistics. I need 4 hours to get the trailer loaded properly.
I'll text you the address. Come straight there. A pause, and then a shift in her voice, something that had been operational becoming briefly something else. Cole, this is it. Yeah, he said.
It is. He drove back to the shop and started loading. The drive to Phoenix took 2 hours with the trailer, and Cole made it without incident, which was not something he'd fully expected. Some part of him had been braced for something to go wrong, the way you're braced when you're carrying the last irreplaceable version of a thing. Nothing went wrong.
The desert highway was flat and clear. The trailer tracked straight, the car sat on its moving blankets in the enclosed trailer, and arrived in Phoenix intact. Victoria's storage facility was in an industrial district east of Scottsdale, a professional-grade unit with electronic access and a monitoring system and a level of security that was considerably beyond what Bennett Restoration had ever operated. Two of Victoria's staff were there to help unload. Cole directed them carefully, and within an hour the prototype was secured inside, documented by Victoria's own facility cameras, and officially no longer sitting unprotected in a two-bay shop off I-10.