“I’m doing fine,” I told her.

“That’s a sentence people say right before they pass out.”

She brought groceries anyway.

One winter a dealership gave me a difficult black Porsche to correct. The paint had tiny swirls under every light, and its owner had sent it back to two other shops. I worked three nights until my shoulders burned and my hands looked as if I’d dipped them in solvent. When the owner saw the finished car beneath the shop lamps, he didn’t say anything for nearly a minute.

Then he asked how many more cars I could take.

That single job introduced me to collectors. The collectors introduced me to other people who cared less about a flashy storefront than whether I kept my word. Three years later I signed a lease on a building with dry floors, proper drains, and enough room for four cars. I hired a manager named Marisol Vega who could organize chaos with a clipboard and one raised eyebrow. I brought on Theo Parker, a paint specialist who could distinguish four shades of black under a cloudy sky.

The first morning our new sign went up, I stood in the parking lot and stared at it until the sun cleared the warehouse roofs.

FIRST LIGHT AUTO STUDIO.

My name didn’t appear anywhere on the sign. That was intentional. I wanted the work to be bigger than me.

A few months later my father visited. He ran his fingers along the polished reception counter, opened a cabinet, checked the hinges, and walked through the bays as if inspecting a city bus depot.

Finally he stopped under the sign and said, “Roof doesn’t leak.”

It was the nicest thing he’d ever said about the business.

CHAPTER TWO — The Car That Waited

The yellow Lamborghini wasn’t my first expensive vehicle. It was the first one I owned that expensive people assumed I must have borrowed.

I’d loved the shape of those cars since childhood. My father took me to a downtown auto show when I was ten, and I spent fifteen minutes staring at a low yellow machine parked behind velvet ropes. He watched me circle it, my hands clasped behind my back because he had warned me not to touch anything.

“One day,” I told him, “I’m going to have one.”

He looked at the price tag and whistled. “Then you’d better get very good at something.”

When my business began making real money, I did not buy the car. I bought a second lift. Then a paint booth. Then better health insurance for my employees. I upgraded the shop’s ventilation after Theo developed a stubborn cough. Every time a sales representative mentioned a luxury sports car, Marisol slid another equipment invoice across my desk.

“You can dream after payroll,” she said.

She wasn’t joking. She knew every number on our books.

The right car eventually came through a collector who had been a client for years. It was a yellow Lamborghini Aventador with custom carbon-fiber details, a carefully commissioned finish, and maintenance records thick enough to make a lawyer happy. He wanted to sell it privately. He trusted me to inspect it. When I explained that I would only buy it if the business could carry on without that money, he laughed.

“You’ve been the most cautious person in my garage for seven years,” he told me. “I’d worry if you didn’t say that.”