Rust and Redline
When Dex Calloway's uncle dies and leaves her his two-bay garage on the edge of Marienthal, Ohio, he also leaves her the project that ate his retirement: a rusted 1970 Cutlass 442 with a 406 block centered on the crossmember and a transmission tunnel waiting to forgive the angle. Dex has spent her career rebuilding other people's machines. This one is hers. Old Buck , the seventy-something machinist who taught her uncle every torque spec and short-cut , refuses to let the Cutlass die on the stand. He shows up at six, claims the stool, and starts in. The Marchetti siblings show up too: Theo with a handshake and a number, his sister Lila with a different number and a longer pause. Silas Voss only ever calls, until one Tuesday he doesn't , and his mother Marta is suddenly paying cash for parts Dex never ordered. Meanwhile Judge Harlan is signing things at the county courthouse that keep shrinking the calendar on the garage's mortgage. What Dex finds buried in the engine bay is heavier than cast iron: a paper trail running through the bank on the square, a redlined loan her uncle never signed, and a small-town ledger of favors the Marienthal families have been settling for twenty years. To finish the Cutlass she has to finish what her uncle started, and to keep the garage she has to open the hood on a town that would rather let it rust shut.