"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.