The problem was that nobody who walked into Lakeshore Aurelia on a rainy Tuesday morning was going to spend a hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars. Customers like that made appointments. They arrived in tailored coats with a driver or a lawyer. They did not wander in out of the weather.

"Hey," Lucy said, more quietly. "You okay?"

Brandon turned and gave her the smile, the full-wattage one. "Never better."

She did not look convinced, but she let it go. Lucy had a habit of letting things go, and then remembering them later.

The front doors slid open and a gust of wet air came in. Brandon straightened out of habit, already arranging his face. But it was only the other salesmen, Kyle and Dev, shaking out umbrellas and complaining about the traffic. They drifted toward the coffee machine. Dev nodded at the Meridian and said something about how it would sit there until Christmas. Kyle laughed.

"Somebody will buy it," Brandon said, too sharply.

"Sure, man. Somebody."

He turned away and watched the rain streaking down the glass. Beyond the showroom, rows of cars sat dripping in the lot, flags snapping above them. A battered old pickup had pulled into the far corner under a tree. He watched it idle for a minute and thought, without much interest, that it looked like the kind of truck whose owner would want to use the restroom and nothing else.

He was wrong about almost everything that morning. But he did not know it yet, and as he stood there, feeling the weight of the red numbers on the wall behind him, he made the first of several decisions he would spend a long time regretting.

He decided that today, no matter what, he would not waste his time on anyone who looked like they could not pay.

A Hand on the Hood

The showroom doors slid open for the second time that morning, and the man who entered did not look like anyone Brandon wanted to talk to.

He was old, first of all, with a stoop that suggested he had spent a lifetime leaning over workbenches. His canvas jacket was dark with rain and frayed at the cuffs. His cap had a faded logo that Brandon could not read. He wore work boots with a crack along the left toe, and his trousers were creased in the way of clothes that had been washed a thousand times. In one hand he held a folded paper, soft with handling.

He stood just inside the doors, letting the water drip off him onto the mat, and looked at the showroom the way a person looks at a church they have not visited in years.

"Another umbrella-less wonder," Kyle murmured.

"Looking for the bathroom," Dev said. "Ten bucks."

Brandon felt the familiar calculation run through him, quick and cold. Elderly. Wet. Shabby. A coffee-and-brochure type, a window-shopper, someone who would eat up forty minutes of floor time and leave with a pen. He had a rule for people like that, which he had never said aloud but which governed his days. He did not hurry toward them. He let them find the brochures themselves.

The old man did not go to the brochures. He did not go to the coffee, either. He walked straight across the polished floor with a slow, careful step, and Brandon watched with growing unease as he approached the rotating platform in the center of the showroom, where the Meridian turned in its pool of light.

The man stopped a few feet from the car. He took off his cap, and his white hair stood up in damp tufts. For a long moment he did nothing at all. The platform turned, and the light slid along the dark flank of the sedan, and Brandon, who had looked at that car a hundred times, found himself noticing something he had never noticed. The old man's face had gone very still, and his eyes were bright.

Then the old man raised one hand, reached out, and laid it gently on the hood.

His fingers moved. They traced, slowly, a long curve that ran from the front wheel arch back toward the door, following the line of the car's shoulder with a tenderness that Brandon would later recognize and would later wish, more than he had ever wished anything, that he had recognized in the moment.

Instead, he saw only fingerprints.

"Hey!"

The word cracked across the showroom like a dropped tray. Brandon was already moving, his dress shoes slapping the floor, his face flushed hot. "Hey! Sir! Sir, step away from the vehicle!"

The old man turned his head. His hand stayed on the car for a second longer, as though reluctant to leave it. Then it dropped to his side.

"Excuse me," the old man said. His voice was low and a little rough. "I was only—"