The showroom was strangely quiet for a Wednesday. Lucy was on the front desk, taking call after call in her patient, practiced voice. No, ma'am, I can't comment on staff. Yes, ma'am, the general manager is aware. Thank you for your concern. A man in a gray suit had come in around nine, asked pointedly where the sales floor was, looked at the row of salesmen, and left. Two test drives had canceled by phone. A couple who had been about to sign for a minivan had emailed to say they had decided to "go in a different direction."

Brandon felt it all landing on him, coin by coin. He could do the arithmetic without a calculator. Every canceled customer was a lost commission. Every lost commission was a month of his mother's treatment.

"Brandon." Marcus appeared in the doorway of his office, jacket off, tie loose. "Can you come in here?"

He crossed the floor. He felt the whole building watching.

Inside, Marcus did not shut the door this time. He just sat down heavily and looked at Brandon for a moment with an expression Brandon had not seen on his face before. It was neither anger nor contempt. It was something worse, a kind of grief.

"Regional called," Marcus said. "Detroit is aware. They're watching the numbers. Aurelia's social media team is drafting a statement."

"A statement."

"They'll apologize. They'll say the dealership is independently owned. They'll say we're conducting a review." He paused. "And then they'll ask who the man in the video was."

Brandon's hands tightened on his knees. "You said it wasn't my concern."

"It wasn't, yesterday." Marcus turned his laptop around. "It is now."

On the screen was a news article, already published, already shared forty thousand times. A photograph filled the top half of the page, black-and-white, an old company portrait of a young man in a lab coat, his hand resting on the block of an engine. The headline was set in heavy type.

THE MAN WHO BUILT THE ENGINE: Video shows legendary Aurelia designer Walter Hayes, 76, scolded at a dealership showroom.

Brandon read it. Then he read it again, and the words refused to settle. Chief powertrain engineer. Halcyon V8. Married to Margaret Hayes, creator of the Aurelia shoulder line, who passed away two years ago.

He did not hear the rest of what Marcus said. The room seemed to fall away from him, slowly, like the ground from a rising elevator.

He was touching her work.

He stared at the photograph. The face was younger, but it was the face. The same patient eyes. The same faint, apologetic half-smile. On the lapel of the old lab coat, small and bright, was a pin.

"I yelled at him," Brandon whispered. "I told him to go to the bus shelter."

"Yes," said Marcus.

"He apologized to me."

"Yes."

"Marcus, I didn't—" He stopped. There was nothing that came after that sentence which was not a lie.

Marcus closed the laptop gently. "Go home," he said. "Take the rest of the day. Don't answer the phone. Don't read the comments."

Brandon stood up. His legs felt borrowed. He walked out through the showroom, past the silent salesmen, past Lucy, who watched him pass with her hand over the phone's mouthpiece and tears standing in her eyes. He walked past the Meridian, turning, turning, black and magnificent in its pool of light.

He did not look at it. He could not.

The Curve

Brandon did not go home. He drove aimlessly for an hour, and then he drove to the lake, and then he sat in a gas station parking lot with the engine off and his phone buzzing itself dizzy on the passenger seat.

At some point, because he had no other place to put the shame, he began to read.

He read every article. There were more of them now, one after another, each with its own version of the same photograph. He read an obituary of Margaret Hayes from a design magazine, written two years earlier, with a picture of a woman with clay-gray hands and a scarf in her hair, laughing at someone out of frame. She had no formal training. She learned sculpture from her father, a stonemason in Akron, and from a conviction that a surface could be made to feel alive. He read a long profile of Walter, published in a trade journal in 2003, the year he retired. Hayes is known for an almost embarrassing humility. When asked about the Halcyon, which has powered more than nine million vehicles, he deflects credit to the assembly workers who built it. "I drew it," he told this writer. "They made it real."