Three months earlier, I had moved into the house on a quiet street in an upscale Georgia suburb about forty minutes outside Atlanta.
The neighborhood was called Westbridge Estates, a gated community with large brick and stucco homes, broad driveways, carefully maintained landscaping, and decorative streetlamps that came on automatically at dusk.
I wasn't born into money.
My father spent most of his adult life repairing and restoring automobiles. My mother worked as a registered nurse until illness forced her to retire, and my younger sister and I grew up in a modest house where the garage was usually cleaner than the living room.
We weren't poor.
But we were never the kind of family that could purchase an expensive car simply because we liked the color.
My father taught me how to change oil before I learned how to drive. By thirteen, I could identify the sound of a failing water pump, and by sixteen, I could rebuild a carburetor under his supervision.
He believed machinery told the truth.
"If you listen carefully enough," he used to say, "an engine will tell you what's wrong before it quits."
I loved working beside him.
The smell of old leather and engine oil still reminded me of Saturday afternoons when he would open the garage door, turn on the radio, and hand me a wrench before I'd even finished breakfast.
He didn't believe in shortcuts.
If a bolt was stripped, we repaired it properly. If a component was damaged, we looked for the correct replacement rather than forcing something unsuitable into place.
And if we couldn't afford the part, we waited.
That last lesson was difficult when I was young.
But it became important later.
Because the metallic-blue car in the yellow truck wasn't something my father purchased as a wealthy collector.
It was something he had spent nearly forty years protecting.
The car was known as the 1967 Halden Phoenix GT-X.
The manufacturer, a small American performance-car company based near Detroit, had disappeared decades earlier. During the 1960s, its engineering department developed several experimental vehicles intended to demonstrate a new high-performance platform.
Most never reached production.
A few were dismantled after testing.
Others were stripped for parts when the company's finances collapsed.
But one vehicle survived.
Prototype HX-001.
The first fully assembled Phoenix GT-X development car.
It was built with a special reinforced chassis, a hand-finished metallic-blue body, a modified high-output V8, and a series of experimental components that never appeared together on any production model.