Not the money, not the prestige, just the work. The kind of work you were made to do." Jake opened the folder and flipped through the schematics. Victoria watched his face, saw the moment his expression changed. He was hooked.
She could see it in the way his eyes moved across the page, the way his hand traced the edge of the turbine diagram. For the first time since she'd met him, he looked alive. "This is elegant." Jake said quietly. He looked up at her.
"Who designed it?" "A team of 12 engineers." Victoria said. "They've been working on it for 8 months. The problem is the fuel efficiency.
We can't get the burn rate below 0.7 without losing thrust." Jake frowned and flipped to another page. "Your intake geometry is wrong." he said. He pulled a pencil from his toolbox and started sketching on the margin of the schematic.
"You're getting turbulence here, which means you're wasting fuel before it even hits the combustion chamber. If you adjust the angle by 3° and taper the inlet, you'll smooth the flow and drop the burn rate by at least 15%. Victoria stared at the sketch. It was simple, almost obvious now that she saw it. Her team had been so focused on the combustion system that they'd missed the intake entirely.
"That's brilliant." She said. Jake shrugged and handed the folder back. "It's basic aerodynamics." "It's not basic to anyone else."
Victoria said. She looked at him, really looked at him, and for the first time, she saw past the torn flannel and the grease-stained jeans. She saw the man who'd walked away from a career most engineers would kill for, who'd chosen his daughter over everything else, who'd buried his grief in small repairs and quiet mornings. "Come work for me." She said.
"Not full-time. Not in a lab. Just consult. A few hours a week. You can do it from here."
Jake shook his head. "I can't." "Why not?" Victoria said. "Because Emma needs me."
Jake said. His voice was quiet, but firm. "She's 11 years old. She's already lost her mother. I'm not going to lose her, too, because I was too busy chasing some project."
Victoria wanted to argue, but she couldn't. She thought about her own life, the 80-hour weeks, the board meetings that bled into weekends, the vacations she'd never taken because there was always something more important. She'd built an empire, but she'd done it alone. Jake had built something different. Smaller, maybe, but real.