Cole stood in the facility after the staff left and looked at the car one more time. It looked the same as it always had, burned, stripped, the evidence of what it had been through written across every surface. But it looked different here, too, under better lighting, with proper documentation surrounding it, and the weight of the formal report behind it. It looked like what it was. You going to say something to it?
Victoria asked from behind him. Cole turned. She was standing the door with her arms crossed and the hint of something in her expression that wasn't quite humor, but was adjacent to it. "No," he said. "You were looking at it like you were about to. " "I was just looking. " She came and stood beside him.
They both looked at the car for a moment in the particular silence of a thing that's finished. Not the silence of nothing happening, but the silence of something completed. "Dana called while you were driving," Victoria said. "Stratton Group's PR office responded within 2 hours of her initial contact. Standard non-confirm, non-deny.
Their legal team is almost certainly already moving. " She paused. "She's publishing Friday. " "2 days. " "Does she have everything she needs? " "Everything. " "The authentication report, the shipping manifest, the acquisition documents, the photographs, the titanium plates? " "Both of them. " Another pause. "She's calling it the most significant automotive provenance story of the decade. Her words, not mine. " Cole looked at the car. Gerald Marsh had written, "Let the record show it was finished on a plate he'd hidden inside a chassis he must have known might never be found. " Marsh had been wrong about some things and right about others, and had died without seeing any of it come to anything.
Cole thought about that. About the specific frustration of building something real and watching it get erased. The kind of frustration that makes a person hide evidence in a fire-resistant cavity just so the record exists somewhere, even if no one finds it. He understood that frustration. Not at the same scale, not with the same stakes, but in the structural sense.
The feeling of making something that mattered and having the world arrange itself so that it didn't count. "It's going to be messy when it goes public," Cole said. "Very messy. " "Stratton will issue denials. Their legal team will challenge the authentication. There will be a period of dispute that will be unpleasant for both of us.
Victoria was direct about it, the way she was direct about most things. But the documentation is solid. Reyes and Driscoll's reputations are solid. Dana's track record is solid. And the physical evidence doesn't care about legal challenges.