One rainy evening the conversation finally turned to Claire. Daniel was repairing a chest with a cracked drawer, and Victoria noticed a faded photograph above the workbench. It showed a younger Daniel with his arm around a dark-haired woman whose face was turned toward the sun. There was a chair between them, still missing one spindle, and both seemed to be laughing at the effort of holding it upright. Victoria asked softly whether that was his wife.
Daniel laid down his screwdriver. "Claire," he said. For a while he stood looking at the photograph, and Victoria feared she had asked too much. Then he pulled out the spare stool and sat. "She loved estate sales. She could look at a pile of cracked chairs and see an entire dining room where I saw firewood."
They had met when he was twenty-five and working as a junior designer at a firm that supplied furniture manufacturers. Claire taught art classes and restored furniture on weekends, a hobby that gradually filled the small apartment they shared. She convinced him to visit a salvage warehouse one Saturday, then persuaded him that they could repair a broken oak bench in a single afternoon. It took three weekends. The finished bench leaned slightly to one side, and Claire insisted on keeping it exactly that way because she said its imperfection recorded the fact that they had made it together.
Daniel smiled at the memory, then the smile changed. Claire had become ill unexpectedly, and the months that followed were filled with appointments, tests, and the strange routine of learning a language of medical numbers neither of them had ever wanted to speak. Treatment sometimes helped and sometimes did not. Daniel took time away from work, then more time, until his place at the design firm became difficult to maintain. They talked about the future when they could and about the present when the future felt unbearable.
"The last thing she asked me to fix wasn't furniture," he said. "It was the little latch on the garden gate. She kept telling me it squeaked." Victoria watched him rub a thumb across the edge of the stool. "I didn't get around to it before she died. After the funeral, I fixed it in about ten minutes, and then I sat beside it for an hour because there was nobody left to tell me the noise was gone."
Victoria felt her own grief rise to meet his. She could have told him that she understood and turned the moment toward Eleanor, but she sensed that he needed the story to remain his for a little longer. She waited, keeping both hands around her mug. Daniel thanked her for listening after a silence that felt natural rather than empty. She asked whether he still missed Claire, and he answered without hesitation.