"What's happened?" he asked. "You look like you found something you've been hunting."
"I found something I didn't know to look for."
She spread the photographs across the clean end of his workbench. Daniel's expression changed slowly. He recognized the drawings immediately, but his first reaction was not pride. It was the startled stillness of a person discovering a forgotten version of himself waiting in a room where he thought no part of that life remained.
"Where did you get these?" he asked.
"The Sterling Living archive. The Arden Collection. Your name is in the old ledger."
He sat on a stool and lifted one photograph toward the light. "I haven't seen this drawing in fifteen years."
"You designed it."
"I contributed to it," he corrected gently. "We worked in a small team. Leonard Wade handled the final production tolerances. Another woman chose the veneers. I did the early proportions and worked out some of the joint details. It wasn't a one-person achievement."
"Your handwriting is all over the original plans."
"I had strong opinions about drawers that would still open after being moved from one house to another." He gave a small smile. "Claire teased me about that. She said nobody would ever notice a drawer working properly because they'd be too busy filling it with things they couldn't find later."
Victoria pointed to the photograph of the prototype. "She was there."
Daniel looked at it longer. "That was the first time one of my designs was going into production. Claire insisted we celebrate. We didn't have enough money for a restaurant, so she bought cheap wine and made pasta in our apartment. We ate sitting on the floor because our own table was still in pieces."
His smile faded into something gentler. "I thought the world was opening up. In some ways it was. I just didn't know what parts of it would disappear before I had time to appreciate them."
Victoria sat opposite him. "I'd like to do something about this. The company can acknowledge your contribution properly, and I'd like to offer you a creative consultancy. We have senior designers who'd learn from you. You could set your own hours. The salary would be substantial, and the work would be yours to shape."
Daniel glanced toward the photographs. "You already know what I'm going to say."
"Do I?"
"I appreciate it. But I don't want to return to that life."
"You wouldn't have to work the way you did before."
"I know you mean that, but the problem isn't simply the schedule." He ran a finger above the edge of the drawing without touching it. "That young man on the page believed every useful thing he made had to lead somewhere bigger. A promotion, a better job, an office with windows. He wasn't wrong to want those things. But he didn't know how to stop wanting them long enough to notice the life he already had."
"You regret the work?"