“You’re willing to destroy your family over a seven-year-old compact car.”

“The car didn’t break anything, Dad,” I said.

I pressed the red icon on my phone screen and ended the call before he could reply.

I laid the phone flat on the wooden table next to my open engineering ledger.

The evening breeze drifted quietly across the patio, lifting the corner of page forty-eight.

On the table next to my pen lay the light blue slip of the California temporary registration, its black ink clean and dry.

I picked my grid-lined engineering logbook up off the nightstand and smoothed the first page open on the wooden desk.