"You saw how much money was inside my wallet. You must have known what the reward could mean for you."
Daniel rested his forearms on the table. "I knew it might help. I'm not going to pretend I live so comfortably that money doesn't matter."
"Then what made the decision easy?"
"It wasn't as easy as you think," he answered. "For a second I imagined what that money could do. Roof repairs, new machinery, and maybe a few months when I could turn away work I didn't enjoy. Then I imagined how I'd feel when I looked at the things I'd bought and remembered why I had them. I wasn't comfortable with that."
Victoria studied his face. "Most people would have called it a gift."
"Maybe it would have been, if we'd known each other. But I didn't want the first thing between us to be a debt."
She looked down into her tea. The phrase landed somewhere she could not immediately identify. Most of the relationships she had built over the last decade contained accounts of one kind or another: favors owed, introductions exchanged, contracts made, access negotiated. She had grown so accustomed to those invisible balances that the absence of one felt like an unexplained disturbance.
"I asked someone to look into you," she admitted. "Public records. I stopped him after I realized I was doing something unfair."
Daniel did not answer immediately. Rain slid down the window in wavering lines. "Did you find anything interesting?"
"Almost nothing."
"Sounds about right."
"I found out your wife died," Victoria said softly. "I'm sorry. I should have let you tell me if you wanted me to know."
He looked toward a small photograph on a shelf above the bench. In it a woman with wavy dark hair was holding up a badly repaired stool and laughing so hard her eyes were nearly closed. Daniel reached over, turned the photograph toward Victoria, and set it between their mugs.
"Her name was Claire. She loved terrible old furniture and thought every piece deserved one more chance. She was less forgiving of people who parked badly, but she was wonderful with chairs."
Victoria smiled despite the ache in his voice. "How long were you married?"
"Eleven years. Together longer." He ran his thumb along the edge of the frame. "She used to say a good piece of furniture should show a little evidence that somebody lived with it. Scratches weren't always damage. Sometimes they were history."
"What happened to her?"
"An illness that moved faster than either of us expected. There were treatments, appointments, the whole careful routine of hoping the next report would be better. It never was."
Victoria let the silence remain rather than filling it with a rehearsed condolence. After a while Daniel said he had left his old design work because he could no longer tolerate how easily a meeting could consume a day that ought to have mattered. For months after Claire's funeral, even the workshop had felt unbearable. Alice's porch step was the first thing he had fixed without being forced to, and its ordinary usefulness had reminded him that he could still make something steady with his hands.
"I don't restore furniture to prove broken things are always repairable," he said. "Some aren't. Some losses stay losses. I work because caring for something in front of you is still worthwhile, even after something you loved is gone."
Victoria thought of her mother and the ring inside her bag. She had never described her own grief in those terms. She had turned mourning into schedules, kept appointments during hospital stays, answered emails after the funeral, and built a business large enough to make the absence of one person disappear beneath the noise. The business grew. The absence did not.
"My mother died before Sterling Living became anything," she said. "She had a way of knowing when I was about to do something stupid. I spent years wishing she could have seen what I built. Then I started wondering whether she'd recognize the person who built it."
Daniel listened without moving to rescue her from the thought. "What do you think she'd recognize?" he asked.
Victoria considered the question for a long time. "My stubbornness," she said finally. "And my inability to leave a problem alone."
"That's something."
"She'd probably ask why I work so much."
"What would you tell her?"
"That I have people depending on me."
"Is that the whole answer?"
Victoria looked at him. In a boardroom, she would have taken the question as a challenge. Here, with rain on the roof and a photograph of Claire smiling between them, she found herself unexpectedly grateful for it. "No," she admitted. "It isn't."
She left near dusk. Daniel walked her to the car carrying an umbrella with two broken ribs that he seemed determined to keep using. The rain had softened to mist, and the street smelled of wet earth and cut grass. He paused beside her driver's door.
"Thank you for coming," he said. "I'm sorry I don't have anything more impressive to offer than tea."
"Don't apologize for the tea," Victoria replied. "It may be the best thing anyone's offered me all month."
On her drive home, the city's familiar towers appeared through the windshield one by one. She was due to attend a private dinner with investors that evening, and Ethan had already texted twice asking whether he should confirm the reservation. She called him from a parking space and canceled. Instead she stopped at a small grocery store, bought bread and soup, and took them home herself. She ate in the kitchen rather than the dining room because sitting at a formal table alone suddenly seemed an unnecessary performance.
A week later, she went back. This time she called first, using the number Daniel had written on a scrap of paper when he offered to let her see how the repaired oak table turned out. His answer was simply, "Of course. Alice will probably be here stealing my biscuits." Victoria drove over after work and brought a packet of proper tea because she had noticed he was nearly out.