"Nothing wrong with a calendar," he said. "The question is whether you use it to remember a person or to make remembering them look good."
Victoria nudged him with her elbow. "You know you could be very annoying in a boardroom."
"I remember. That's one reason I left."
The first time she spent a whole Sunday helping Alice clear leaves from her yard, Victoria learned how hard ordinary work could be on muscles she rarely used. The morning began with a rake, a wheelbarrow, and a plan Alice insisted was simple. By noon, leaves had escaped every pile Victoria made, her shoulders ached, and Daniel was laughing openly at the expression on her face. She was tempted to hire a landscaping company by lunchtime, but Alice asked whether she could finish the side path first, and Victoria stayed.
Afterward they sat on the steps drinking lemonade, the yard not perfectly clean but noticeably better. Alice examined Victoria's tired hands. "You don't do much of this at home, I imagine."
"I own equipment for it," Victoria admitted. "Other people use it."
"Nothing wrong with paying people for good work. But it's useful to know what their work feels like sometimes. Makes you less careless with their time."
Victoria looked at the neat piles of leaves waiting to be carried away. She thought of the cleaning staff at her estate, the landscaping crew, the warehouse workers who unloaded shipments during winter storms. She paid all of them, but she could not remember the last time she had asked whether the tasks she assigned were reasonable. The next week she arranged a meeting with the company operations team about scheduling and workloads. Not because she had become an expert after one afternoon with a rake, but because she had finally become aware of how much she did not know.
That same Sunday, Alice told Victoria a story about Claire while Daniel was taking tools back to his garage. Claire had once organized a neighborhood supper after a storm left several elderly residents without power. The event began with four people sharing soup and ended with half the block sitting around borrowed tables beneath flashlights and candles. Claire had insisted that nobody needed to contribute anything they could not spare. When someone embarrassed about having no food apologized, she told him his job was to show up and eat.
"He loved her fiercely," Alice said. "The whole street did."
Victoria kept her eyes on the yard. "I know."
"You aren't competing with a ghost, dear."
Victoria turned, surprised by the directness. Alice looked at her over the rim of her lemonade glass. "People who are gone don't stop mattering when somebody new arrives. And people who stay behind don't stop being alive because they miss someone. Daniel knows that in his head. His heart takes longer."
Victoria considered whether to deny that anything had changed between her and Daniel. There had been no declaration, no kiss, no formal conversation about what they were becoming. Yet she thought of him first when something amused her during a difficult day, and she found herself noticing how the light shifted across the workshop on evenings when she could not visit.