A shipment of brake components vanished somewhere between the warehouse and the shop. Never explained, never replaced, leaving three scheduled repairs stalled for a week. Two long-standing customers mentioned, almost apologetically, that a new shop across the county line had offered them service at half price. Service that, as it turned out, came from Donovan's chain under a different name, a fact Adeline uncovered only after cross-referencing the new shop's business registration with public filings late one night. The timing troubled Adeline more than the individual incidents themselves.
A canceled supplier account, a missing shipment, and a competitor's sudden discount could each be explained away separately. But arriving within the same 10 days felt less like misfortune and more like a plan carried out in careful sequence. She began keeping a small notebook of dates and events, a habit left over from her old career, one she had once used to track something far more dangerous than a rival mechanic's pride. Adeline suspected sabotage before Coulter allowed himself to consider it. She began tracking the pattern of cancellations, the timing of the missing shipment, the sudden interest of Donovan's people in the shop's supplier contracts.
Coulter dismissed her concerns at first, insisting that bad luck simply came in clusters sometimes, the way storms did, a man more comfortable blaming weather than accepting that someone might be working deliberately against him. But when a letter arrived from the bank threatening foreclosure over a missed payment, neither of them remembered missing, even he could no longer explain it away as coincidence. Adeline spent that entire night at the shop, going through boxes of records that had clearly not been touched in years. Searching for the source of the discrepancy, the office grew colder as the hours passed. The old space heater in the corner rattling weakly against the chill, and she wrapped herself in Coulter's spare coat, which still smelled faintly of motor oil and cedar without quite noticing she had done it.
Around midnight, she found the first error, a payment recorded twice under two different customer names. And from there, the threads began to unravel, one after another. She found errors everywhere. Not fraud exactly, but the kind of quiet chaos that builds when a grieving man tries to run a business and a household and a life, all with the same two exhausted hands. She found unpaid invoices from customers who had simply been forgotten.
Money owed to the shop that no one had ever collected, some going back nearly 2 years. She found a tax refund from 3 years earlier that had never been claimed, sitting untouched because the paperwork required to claim it had been buried beneath a stack of unrelated receipts. By 3:00 in the morning, she had covered the office floor with color-coded stacks of paper, a system only she could read, muttering numbers under her breath as she cross-checked totals against bank statements spread across the desk. By sunrise, exhausted, but cleareyed, she had assembled enough documentation to buy the shop several months of breathing room, enough to answer the bank's letter with facts instead of apologies, and enough, though she did not yet realize it, to change the way Coulter looked at her entirely. When Coulter arrived that morning and saw the stacks of neatly organized paper, saw the numbers that suddenly made sense for the first time in years, he stood in the doorway of his own office for a long moment before he could speak.