Not because he needed nine days to diagnose the problem. He had a clear picture of the work within the first two hours. The engine had seized from sitting, as he'd suspected. The fuel lines had cracked through. The brake fluid had absorbed moisture over the years and would need a full flush.
The rubber throughout the engine bay had gone brittle and would need replacing component by component, carefully, without rushing. He called her on the ninth day because he had found something he didn't know how to tell her about over the phone. When she arrived that Saturday morning with no meeting scheduled, wearing jeans and a simple gray sweater, which Ethan noticed without meaning to, he led her around to the driver's side of the car. The door was open. He pointed to the lower edge of the seat where the upholstery met the door sill.
Tucked into the gap, so far down it would have been invisible unless you were lying on the floor with a flashlight, was a small envelope. Yellowed with age. Sealed. Claire's name was written on the front in handwriting she recognized instantly. Her father's handwriting.
She stood very still for a long moment. Ethan didn't say anything. He had learned, over years of working with people's inherited cars, that there were times when the right thing to do was simply step back and give someone the space to feel what they needed to feel. Claire's hand moved to the envelope slowly. She picked it up with both hands, the way you pick up something fragile, and she stood there in the middle of the garage holding her father's last letter to her, and Ethan quietly went to the other side of the shop and found something to do there.
Rosie, watching from her stool with Theodore, seemed to understand in the wordless way that children sometimes understand things, and she did not say a word either. She just watched and held her bear and was very quietly present in the way that small people can be when they sense the world is asking for gentleness. She read it outside, sitting on the low concrete step at the side of the building, in the mild September sunshine. Ethan brought her a cup of coffee without being asked, black, which was a guess, but the right one, and set it beside her and went back inside. The letter was three pages, written in her father's careful, looping hand.
He had written it on the day he had put the car into storage, the day his illness had progressed to the point where he knew he would not be driving it again. He had not wanted to send it at the time because he did not want her grief to begin before it had to. He had tucked it into the car so that it would find her when she was ready to bring the Porsche back to life. When she was ready to let something she had been holding on to very tightly begin to move again. He wrote about the drives they had taken when she was young.
The way she had sat in the passenger seat reading her book while he drove, and how he had always loved that about her, that she could be completely present in a moment while also somewhere else entirely. He wrote that he was proud of the life she had built. He wrote that he hoped by the time the car found her again, she had found someone to share the passenger seat with. Not because she needed anyone, she never had, but because the best things in life, he wrote, run smoother with someone alongside. He signed it: All my love, always, Dad.
Claire sat with the letter for a long time. The coffee went cold. The September light moved across the parking lot in that unhurried way it has in early autumn, when the days are still warm enough to sit outside, but you can feel the year beginning to turn. When she finally came back inside, her eyes were clear, but her face had lost the careful composure she had walked in with. She looked, Ethan thought, like herself.
Whatever that meant. He had the feeling he was only beginning to know. He left you a letter, Ethan said. Not a question. He always knew more than he let on, Claire said quietly.
She looked at the car. How is she coming? She's coming, Ethan said. She's going to be something. She came back the following Saturday.
And the one after that. She told herself it was because she wanted to monitor the progress, a reasonable enough explanation, the kind that holds up fine when you're not examining it too closely. She would arrive at 9:30, and Ethan would show her what he'd done that week, walking her through each repair with a patience and precision that she recognized, having spent years building her own company, as the mark of someone who genuinely loves what they do. He explained the flat-six engine to her without condescension. He showed her how the original Bosch fuel injection worked, why it was worth restoring properly rather than retrofitting something modern, and what the difference would sound like once the car was running: the difference between a properly tuned air-cooled engine and anything else ever made.
She found herself looking forward to those explanations in a way she did not entirely understand. And then there was Rosie, who greeted her each Saturday with the comfortable ease of a child who has decided, without drama, that she likes you and sees no reason to hide it. They did a jigsaw puzzle together one afternoon while Ethan worked. Rosie told her very seriously about her teacher, Mrs. Patterson, who gave too much homework but had a really nice voice when she read aloud. Claire told Rosie about the time she had gotten completely lost in downtown Los Angeles at the age of 12 and had asked a stranger for directions and the stranger had turned out to be a very famous actor and Rosie had listened to this story with enormous interest and then said, Were you scared when you were lost?
Yes, Claire said honestly. Rosie nodded, satisfied. Daddy says being scared is okay. It just means something matters to you. Claire looked across the shop to where Ethan was carefully bleeding the brake lines, his head down, entirely focused, apparently unaware that he had just, through his 6-year-old daughter, said something that landed squarely in the center of Claire Beaumont's chest.