"No. I'm trying to understand him. It's different." Tom pulled into their driveway and cut the engine. For a moment they sat in the ticking quiet. "Priya, I did something I'm not sure about."
She waited.
He took out his phone, thumbed it open, and held it out. On the screen was a paused video, shaky and slightly tilted, showing the Lakeshore Aurelia showroom, the rotating black car, an old man with white hair, and a younger man in a blue tie with his arms spread wide.
"You filmed it," she said.
"I started filming when he raised his voice. I don't know why. It was reflex. Maybe because I teach high school and I've learned that when an adult starts shouting at someone smaller, you want a record." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm sorry. I should have asked."
"It's okay." She took the phone and played it. Thirty-eight seconds. She watched the old man take off his cap. She watched his hand along the hood. She watched him say, in a voice like worn velvet, I understand. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cause trouble.
When it ended, she handed the phone back and wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
"Are you going to post it?"
"I don't know." Tom stared through the windshield. "Part of me wants to. People need to see how some of these places treat folks. But I don't know who he is. I don't know if he'd want to be seen like that. It might be one of the worst moments of his week, and I'd be handing it to the entire internet."
"So don't."
"But what if there's a pattern? What if this salesman does it to everyone?"
Priya thought about it. She had grown up in a small town in Gujarat, where her grandmother had run a roadside tea stall for forty years, and she had learned a long time ago that there were two kinds of people in the world. There were the ones who looked at the tired old woman behind the counter and saw a service. And there were the ones who asked her name.
"Let's go inside," she said. "Make dinner. Think about it. We don't have to decide tonight."
They ate leftover dal and rice at the kitchen table, not talking much. Afterward, while Priya washed dishes, Tom sat with his laptop and replayed the video, frame by frame. He was a history teacher and he had a habit of studying photographs until they gave up their secrets. On the fourth viewing, he paused the footage at the moment the old man reached for his cap.
"Priya. Come look at this."
She came over, drying her hands. Tom zoomed the image until the pixels bloomed. On the front of the man's faded cap, barely legible, was a small embroidered logo, a stylized wing.
"That's the old Aurelia emblem," Tom said. "My dad had a mug with that on it. He used to work parts at a supplier in Toledo."
"So the man worked for the company?"
"Maybe. Look at this." He zoomed again, to the lapel of the old man's jacket, where a spot of lighter fabric showed in the shape of something small and round. "There was a pin there. You can see the thread worn thin. He wore it so long it left a mark."
Priya leaned closer. A cold feeling spread slowly through her chest. "So he was a regular guy who worked for Aurelia. And he walked into an Aurelia dealership, and the salesman—"
"Treated him like a vagrant."
They looked at each other.
"I think maybe he's somebody," Tom said quietly. "I think maybe he used to be a big deal and nobody in that room knew."
"It shouldn't matter if he was."
"No. It shouldn't. But it does, because it makes people notice." He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his sweater. "That's the ugly truth of it, isn't it? If he'd been just some old man, we'd have watched it and felt bad and gone home. It's only because there's a chance he's someone that I'm even tempted to share it."
Priya was silent for a moment. "Then maybe the answer is to find out who he is first. Ask him. Let him decide."
"How?"
"We email the dealership. Tonight. We tell them what we saw and ask them to pass our contact information to the man. If he wants it posted, or deleted, or sent to a lawyer, that's his call."
Tom smiled, tiredly. "You're smarter than me."
"I'm just kinder than you. It's a different thing."
He wrote the email at the kitchen table, three careful paragraphs, ending with a line that Priya insisted on adding: We want you to know that we saw what happened, and that we thought he was the only person in that room who behaved with dignity. He sent it at 9:47 p.m. to the general inbox listed on the Lakeshore Aurelia website.