For months, he’d been scouring the entire Granite, Texas, area looking for an old building that he could buy and turn into an automotive repair shop. After all, he’d been dreaming of opening his own garage since he was fifteen years old. Back then, he used to spend hours tearing old car engines apart and then putting them back together again just for the hell of it. Now, at age thirty, he actually got paid to do it.

Brett was a damn good mechanic. Always had been. Which was probably why almost everyone in town brought their vehicles to him when they needed work done. He had a great customer base, but oftentimes he was so busy that he had no choice but to pass some of the repair jobs off to another mechanic in the shop. He hated doing that though because he couldn’t guarantee the other guy’s work like he could his own.

Sadly, not all mechanics took pride in their work like Brett did. He didn’t randomly guess at what was wrong with a vehicle without doing some kind of research to make sure he was on the right track, and he didn’t take shortcuts just because doing so would be easier or faster. He believed in finding the actual problem and repairing it correctly the first time rather than doing a half-assed job.

That was one of the reasons he wanted to open his own business. The moment he found a suitable location, he planned to open a garage and hire a couple of great mechanics who held the same beliefs as he did and who would do things the proper way. But Granite was a small town, and finding a place for sale that met his needs hadn’t been easy.

Brett didn’t need anything big and fancy. He was used to working in cramped quarters and spent most of his time crawling around under a hood or sliding beneath a car on the cracked wooden creeper that his boss was too cheap to replace. But there were a few requirements on which Brett—unlike his boss—refused to budge.

The structure of the building needed to be large enough to house a separate waiting area for the customers in order to keep them safe and out of the mechanics’ way. Also, the parking lot needed to have enough lighting to be secure and have enough space to store vehicles overnight, if necessary. The last thing he wanted to worry about was a customer getting hurt or their vehicle getting stolen or broken into. So as far as Brett was concerned, these things were nonnegotiable.

Unfortunately, that only made it harder to find a place.