Daniel smiled faintly.
“Do your homework.”
She sat.
But ten minutes later Daniel looked through the office glass and saw that she had not written a single word.
Neither had he repaired anything.
Because what had happened inside the garage that afternoon had started much earlier than either of them knew.
Three days earlier, Victoria Sterling had been standing in the private dressing room of her Manhattan penthouse while an assistant fastened the clasp of a diamond bracelet around her wrist.
Victoria rarely wore it.
Not because it was worth close to two million dollars.
Because it had belonged to her mother.
Isabelle Sterling had died from ovarian cancer when Victoria was eight.
There were photographs.
Videos.
Letters.
But memory was cruelly selective.
Victoria remembered her mother’s perfume.
The way she tapped a spoon against a teacup.
A song she hummed while brushing Victoria’s hair.
But not her laugh.
She could see it on video.
She could not hear it inside her own head anymore.
The bracelet had been the last gift Isabelle gave her.
Not directly.
Victoria was too young.
Isabelle left instructions in her will.
For Victoria’s thirtieth birthday.
A 1920s Cartier-style diamond and sapphire bracelet her own mother had worn.
On Victoria’s thirtieth birthday, Thomas Bell brought the velvet case to her.
Not a lawyer.
Not her father, who had died four years earlier.
Thomas.
He had tears in his eyes.
“She told me to make sure you received this from someone who remembered her wearing it.”
Victoria had cried in his arms.
That was Thomas.
Or at least the version she knew.
The man who had driven her to school after her mother died.
The man who carried crackers in the glove compartment because eight-year-old Victoria became carsick.
The man who waited through piano lessons.
The man who sat outside a hospital operating room when she had her appendix removed at fourteen and her father was in Singapore negotiating a hotel acquisition.
When Victoria’s father forgot her sixteenth birthday dinner, Thomas took her to a diner at midnight and bought pancakes.
When she learned to drive, her father purchased the car.
Thomas taught her not to crash it.
When boys broke her heart, Thomas never asked names.
He only said:
“Anyone who makes you feel smaller than you were before meeting them does not belong in your future.”
Victoria had repeated that advice in interviews.
Never mentioning who said it.
Because Thomas hated attention.
Or so she believed.
Three days before the garage accusation, Victoria had worn her mother’s bracelet to a private investment dinner in Greenwich.
Thomas drove.
Halfway there, the clasp loosened.
Victoria noticed.
She removed it.
“Thomas.”
“Yes, Miss Victoria?”
He still called her that sometimes.
She smiled.
“Remind me to have this clasp repaired.”
She placed the bracelet inside its burgundy velvet case.
Then opened the Mercedes center console and put it inside.
Thomas looked in the mirror.
“I will.”
After dinner, Victoria took another vehicle home because Thomas reported the Mercedes had begun hesitating under acceleration.
The following morning, it would not start.
Thomas arranged a tow.
Sterling’s preferred Mercedes dealership could not take the vehicle until the next week.
Thomas suggested the small independent garage less than four miles from the Greenwich country estate where Victoria had spent the night.
“Carter Motor Works has good reviews,” he said.
Victoria barely listened.
“Fine.”
That single word carried consequences nobody in the room understood.
Daniel Carter did not look like somebody billionaires trusted with a Mercedes.
At least not according to the unconscious calculations Victoria had made the first time she stepped into his garage.
He was forty-one.
Tall enough.
Broad shoulders built from work rather than a gym.
Thick brown hair he cut when it became inconvenient.
Short stubble.
Gray-brown eyes.
A charcoal work shirt with his last name embroidered in small white letters over the pocket.
Grease on one forearm.
Faded jeans.
Brown boots.
No polished customer lounge.
No espresso machine.
No glass wall separating mechanics from customers.
Just tools.
Concrete.
A red rolling cart.
Two lifts.