The same wheel I had held as a kid, sitting in the driver’s seat while he explained how the engine worked. Ray handed it to me without ceremony. It was in the pile waiting to be processed. I pulled it before they melted the batch. I tried to pay him. He refused. Just glad something survived.
The steering wheel sits on my mantle now next to the last photograph I have of my father. He’s leaning against the Shelby, arms crossed, smiling at the camera with the kind of contentment that comes from finishing something you’re proud of. We took that picture two months before he died. He never saw the car completed.
The final details, the last adjustments, the first drive with everything working perfectly, those happened after he was gone. I finished the restoration alone, following the notes he had left. Doing each step the way he taught me. The car was his dream. Completing it was my promise. Now the car is gone.
10 years of work compressed into scrap metal. $2.1 million reduced to a restitution order that will probably never be fully paid. But the steering wheel remains the part my father touched most. The connection between his hands and mine across three decades of shared work. When I look at it, I don’t think about Christine Rogers or the trial or the money.
I think about Saturday mornings in the garage, the smell of motor oil and coffee, my father’s voice explaining something technical with the patience of someone who genuinely loved teaching. Those memories don’t live in a car. They live in me. Christine couldn’t crush that. No one can.
I don’t think about her much anymore. She’s serving her sentence. Gerald is navigating probation and federal prosecutors. The community is healing. The legal system did what it was designed to do slowly and imperfectly, but eventually. Justice isn’t about destroying the people who wronged you.
It’s about restoring balance. Making sure the next person who believes their position makes them invincible learns otherwise before they cause the same damage. My father used to say that the right way to do something is the only way to do it. Every step matters, even the ones no one will see.
Christine Rogers built her entire operation on the assumption that no one would check her work, that corners could be cut indefinitely, that power without oversight was the same as power without limits. She was wrong. And now she has 3 and a half years to think about why. The steering wheel catches the light differently depending on the time of day. In the morning, the wood grain looks almost golden.
