The room became louder, but not because people were fighting. They were realizing they had been holding the same questions separately for years.
Vivienne finally banged her pen on the table.
“This is not a public interrogation,” she snapped. “We are neighbors.”
“Then let your neighbors speak,” Priya said.
For one brief second Vivienne lost the expression she’d worn at my front door. I saw plain anger, unsoftened by manners.
The secretary announced the meeting would be adjourned early. People stayed in their chairs anyway, comparing letters and asking one another which rules had been applied to which houses.
Outside, Arthur joined me beside the parking lot.
“You may have ruined her week,” he said.
“I didn’t come to ruin anything.”
“I know. That’s probably what bothered her.”
CHAPTER EIGHT — A Customer Named Robert
Business did not pause because my neighborhood had developed an unusual interest in my garage door. Two days after the meeting, I got a call from Robert Hale, a longtime customer with a vintage Aston Martin.
“Malcolm,” he said, “I heard there’s some trouble around your shop.”
I closed my office door. “What kind of trouble?”
“A woman called my office asking whether I’d had quality concerns. Said she was collecting community feedback about businesses that handle expensive property.”
I could feel my shoulders stiffen.
“Did she give her name?”
“Vivienne Hargrove.”
“I’m sorry she bothered you.”
“Don’t apologize on her behalf. I’m calling because I want you to know.”
Robert had first trusted me with his car eight years earlier, when First Light was still in the small building near the railroad tracks. Once, after I found a hairline crack in a custom part, I’d called him and refused to return the car until he approved a repair. I lost money on the delay. He remembered.
“She asked if the Lamborghini was really yours,” he added.
I let out a breath. “What did you say?”
“I asked what that had to do with my car. She didn’t seem to have an answer.”
He paused. “Malcolm, don’t underestimate someone who has enough free time to make trouble professionally.”
That afternoon I met with Dana Holloway, the lawyer who handled our business contracts. Dana had an office above an old bookstore and the manner of someone who’d learned long ago that anger rarely made paperwork more persuasive.
I showed her the HOA letters, the social-media clip, and Robert’s email confirming the call.
“Document contacts with customers,” she said. “Don’t accuse anyone publicly until we know exactly what happened. And don’t use your personal account to argue with that boy.”
“I haven’t.”
“Good.”
She made copies of everything. We discussed a formal letter asking Vivienne to stop contacting customers about a private dispute, and she reminded me that not every obnoxious act was a crime. Some were civil issues. Some were simply ugly behavior that a person had a right to dislike without inviting a court into their life.
I appreciated the distinction. I wanted peace, not a lawsuit collection.
But when I returned to the shop, Marisol showed me that someone had submitted three anonymous online complaints about our work in one afternoon. None identified a vehicle. All used similar phrases about “questionable ownership” and “untrustworthy business practices.”
“Could be anybody,” she said.
“It could.”
I looked through the glass toward the cars under the lights. Employees moved from bay to bay, doing precise work while the world outside made stories about us.
