"The speeches take nearly two hours," she observed, scanning the program. "Do we really need that many?"
"Tradition," Ethan said. "The board chairman, the regional directors, the investor representative, you, and usually a video about quarterly performance."
"People work all year and we invite them to spend their evening listening to senior management congratulate itself."
Ethan hesitated. "I would never phrase it that way in an email."
"Neither would I. Not anymore." She marked several sections of the program. "Keep the employee recognition. Let the regional teams submit short stories about work they're proud of, and give the production and delivery teams a voice. Cut the investor video; the investors already know how to read a report."
He made notes, then looked up. "Do you want to bring a guest?"
Victoria felt herself becoming unexpectedly careful. "I might."
Ethan raised an eyebrow, but she waved him toward the door before he could ask more. She knew whom she wanted beside her, and she knew equally well that Daniel might dislike everything about an evening surrounded by investors and polished executives. She would ask, but she would not arrange it for him. The difference mattered now.
That afternoon she found Daniel helping a neighbor transport a repaired bookcase into a small apartment. He carried the bottom while a younger man held the top, guiding the piece carefully through a doorway so narrow that Victoria worried it would never fit. Daniel adjusted the angle with the patient concentration of someone who had learned how to solve a difficult problem without blaming the person standing beside him. When the bookcase finally settled against the wall, the young man's mother thanked them three times and offered money Daniel refused because the repair had been part of a community project already covered by donations.
Outside, Victoria waited until he finished loading the straps into the truck. "Can I ask you something?"
"You can always ask. Doesn't mean you'll like the answer."
"Sterling Living has its annual celebration next month. I'd like you to come with me. Not as a consultant, not to meet investors, and certainly not to impress anyone. Just as my guest."
Daniel leaned against the truck. "A room full of people discussing acquisition strategy while I wonder whether the furniture needs tightening?"
"Some of the furniture probably will," she admitted. "And I promise you won't be required to discuss acquisitions."
"Why would you want me there?"
Victoria looked at him. Her instinct was to give a polished answer about enjoying his company, one that revealed nothing he could use to understand how vulnerable the invitation felt. She set that answer aside. "Because the evenings that matter to me now are the ones you are part of. And because I'd like the people I work with to meet someone who has helped me remember what those people are worth."
Daniel lowered his eyes, thoughtful. "That sounds like a great deal of pressure for a man who owns one decent jacket."
"Wear it. I'll wear a dress that costs too much, and we'll both survive."
He smiled. "All right. I'd like to come."
She took a breath she had not realized she was holding. "Thank you."
A few days later, Victoria visited her mother's grave for the first time in several months without bringing a work phone. The cemetery lay near the older part of the city, under trees that had outgrown the paths planned around them. She carried a small bundle of flowers and her mother's ring in a pouch, leaving it in the pouch rather than placing it on the stone. She had always been afraid that carrying the ring meant she was refusing to let go. Standing there, she began to see that memory and fear were different things.
She sat on a nearby bench and tried to remember the last conversation she had with her mother that was not about illness. The memory came slowly: an afternoon spent driving home from a furniture fair, her mother asking why every chair in the exhibition had looked as though no one was supposed to sit on it. Victoria had defended the designers with the seriousness of someone still convinced that sophistication was a measure of worth. Her mother had replied that a good chair should make a tired person want to rest, and anything else was merely a sculpture with a marketing budget.
Victoria laughed aloud at the memory, startling a bird from a low branch. She wished she could tell her mother about Daniel, about the workshop and Alice and the awkward afternoon beneath the hood of an old truck. She wished she could say that she had learned to sit quietly without feeling she was wasting time. Instead she placed the flowers on the grave and thanked her for things she had not understood when they were given.
Afterward she drove to Daniel's neighborhood and found him on the porch. He took one look at her face and did not ask whether she was all right. He opened the door, warmed tea, and let her sit beside him until she was ready to speak. When she told him where she had been, he reached for her hand and held it without offering an explanation for grief.
"Do you think it's strange," she asked, "that I spent years carrying her ring everywhere but could barely remember the sound of her voice some days?"
"No," Daniel said. "Memories don't obey us just because we want them to. Some days I remember Claire's laugh as clearly as if she's in the next room. Other days I can recall what she said but not the exact sound. It used to frighten me. Now I try to trust that forgetting a detail isn't the same as forgetting a person."
Victoria leaned against the porch railing. "She would have liked you."
"You think so?"
"She would have said you're stubborn and badly in need of new work boots. Then she would have asked you to fix one of her kitchen cabinets."
Daniel laughed. "That sounds fair."