I didn’t argue. I just slid the keys across the table. Travis snatched them up, grinning at his wife like he’d won the lottery. “Smart girl,” he said. “Finally acting like family.” What Travis didn’t know was that three weeks before Dad passed, we’d sat in the hospital with Dad’s lawyer, Mr. Reyes. Dad had signed the truck’s title — and the deed to the garage, and the rights to the restoration channel we’d built together that pulled in 1.2 million subscribers — entirely into a small LLC. An LLC with exactly one member. Me. The keys I handed Travis opened the ignition, sure. But the truck was registered, insured, and titled to Holloway Restorations LLC. Driving it without my written authorization wasn’t inheritance. It was grand theft auto. I waited until he peeled out of the driveway, tires screaming, before I picked up my phone. “Mr. Reyes? He took it. Yes, in front of forty witnesses.” By Monday morning, Travis was sitting across from a sheriff’s deputy explaining why a vehicle he didn’t own was parked in his driveway. By Tuesday, my lawyer filed a civil suit for the $18,000 in restoration parts he’d “inherited.” By Friday, the video I’d quietly recorded of him grabbing the keys — the one where he called me “some little girl who plays with engines” — went up on our channel with Dad’s last voice memo layered underneath: “The truck goes to the kid who showed up. Hannah, that’s you. Always you.” Three million views in 48 hours. Travis’s construction company lost two contracts that week. His wife filed for separation by month’s end. I drove the C10 to Dad’s grave that Sunday, the engine purring exactly the way he taught me to tune it. I set a single wrench on the headstone. “Showed up again, Dad,” I whispered. “Like always.” And somewhere in the Iowa wind, I swear I heard him laugh.
