Victoria looked at the chair Alice had carried away. "You didn't charge her." Daniel glanced up, surprised by the observation. "Her husband fixed our fence after the winter storm the year we moved in. She brought meals after Claire died. If I sent her an invoice for a broken rocker, I'd be the one getting more than I deserved."
Victoria waited until he resumed working before speaking again. "I don't think I've ever had neighbors like that." Daniel considered this without judgment. "Maybe you never had the chance to know them.
Or maybe you didn't have time." She wanted to argue, then realized that both possibilities were probably true. She took another sip of tea and watched him smooth the chair leg with steady, practiced strokes.
When Victoria left almost an hour later, she had learned that Daniel liked the sound of old jazz records, disliked disposable furniture, and believed that people worked best when they did not have to pretend to understand everything immediately. She had also learned that he did not consider silence an invitation to fill the room with talk. Several times they had stopped speaking while he measured a joint or searched for a tool, and the quiet had remained comfortable rather than tense. Driving home, she recognized that it was the first hour in months during which she had not checked her phone. The realization made her smile all the way through the traffic downtown.
Victoria did not return the next day. She wanted to, but she was old enough to recognize the difference between being welcomed once and having permission to make herself a permanent interruption. Instead, she called Daniel's workshop number the following Tuesday and left a message asking whether he might have time for another cup of tea later that week. He returned the call that evening, sounding amused by the formality of her request.
"Thursday's fine," he said. "But you'll have to put up with work. The shop doesn't close just because the company's famous."
"I'm hoping it doesn't," Victoria replied. She hung up and looked at her phone with the unexpected delight of someone who had made a plan for no reason other than wanting to keep it. Ethan noticed her expression when he entered with a stack of revised contracts. He had spent six years watching her face settle into the same focused mask whenever a new obligation arrived. This smile looked nothing like that. He said nothing, but the next time she asked him not to schedule a Thursday evening meeting, he entered the instruction without argument.
At the workshop, Daniel placed a small wooden block on the table before she had even taken off her coat. It was pale ash, roughly the size of a paperback, with two pencil marks on its edge. "You said last time that you built a furniture company," he told her. "I thought you might enjoy learning what happens when the measurements don't agree with the wood."