I don't know what happens next." Victoria turned off the engine and looked at him. "You're going to heal." She said. "And while you do, you're going to keep working on the turbine project from here like you wanted.
I'll pay you the same rate. You don't have to go anywhere." Jake shook his head. "I can't take charity." "It's not charity."
Victoria said. She pulled a folder from her bag and handed it to him. Inside were schematics for a new project. Something her team had been stuck on for months. "This is a next generation engine cooling system.
My engineers can't figure out the thermal distribution. You can. I'm not offering you a handout. I'm offering you a job." Jake opened the folder and scanned the first page.
Victoria watched his face, saw the exact moment his mind engaged. He was still broken, still hurting, but the work was pulling him forward. "Okay." Jake said. He looked at her and for the first time since the accident, he didn't look defeated.
"I'll do it." Over the next few months, Victoria restructured her company in ways that would have seemed insane a year ago. She moved the research and development division from Denver to a new facility just outside Millbrook, a building she purchased and renovated with her own money. It wasn't a grand corporate campus. It was a converted warehouse with high ceilings and good light, the kind of place where engineers could work without feeling like they were trapped in a cubicle farm.
She hired locally, where she could brought in talent from Denver when she couldn't, and made it clear that this wasn't a temporary experiment. This was the future. Jake joined the team officially once he could walk without crutches. He didn't go back to the airfield. The work he was doing now was too important, too consuming.
He designed systems that would power the next generation of military and commercial aircraft solutions that her company's competitors couldn't touch. And he did it from a place where he could pick Emma up from school every day, where he could have dinner with her every night, where he didn't have to choose between his work and his daughter. Victoria moved to Millbrook permanently 6 months after the accident. She sold her apartment in Denver and bought a house on the edge of town, a small place with a porch and a yard that backed up to open fields. It wasn't what she'd imagined for herself, but it was what she needed.
She still traveled for board meetings and investor calls, but she came home to a town where people knew her name, where she could walk into the diner and Betty would pour her coffee without asking. She and Jake didn't talk about what was happening between them. It wasn't a romance in any traditional sense. It was something quieter, built on trust and shared purpose. They worked together during the day, ate dinner together most nights, sat on his porch while Emma did her homework inside.
They didn't need to define it. It was enough that it existed. One evening in late spring, Victoria sat on Jake's porch with a glass of iced tea watching the sun drop behind the mountains. Emma was inside finishing a science project that was due the next day. Jake sat beside Victoria, his legs stretched out still stiff but functional.