He shook his head. "No. I think you've been carrying the whole company on your shoulders for so long that you forgot there are other people holding it up." She was silent for a moment.
"That sounds like something my mother would have said." Ethan smiled faintly. "Then perhaps she was right."
Daniel noticed the difference when she returned to the workshop. She spoke less about being exhausted and more about people whose names she was learning, the decisions they made, and the work they understood better than the executives reviewing their reports. He admired her curiosity but did not pretend that hearing employees once would repair every difficult system. "It's a start," he told her. "A real repair begins when you find out why the joint cracked. If you just hide the crack with varnish, it'll open again."
Victoria repeated that sentence in a leadership meeting the next morning. Several vice presidents wrote it down as though it were a clever management principle she had devised, and Victoria nearly laughed. She explained that a furniture restorer had said it over a cracked cabinet and that the practical meaning was to look for causes rather than blame the people noticing damage. Linda Whitfield, seated at the far end of the table, stopped writing. She recognized the description and disliked the satisfaction on Victoria's face when she spoke of him.
After the meeting, Linda asked Ethan how often Victoria had been visiting Daniel's neighborhood. He said he did not manage the chief executive's personal friendships and did not intend to begin. Linda replied that he was being naive about a man who had approached their employer at the ideal moment to attract her attention. Ethan considered pointing out that Daniel could not have arranged for Victoria's handbag to tear, but he knew arguing with Linda about probability was rarely productive. He told her that any concerns about corporate conflicts should go through legal or compliance, and then he returned to work.
Linda watched Victoria leave early again that Thursday. She had survived reorganizations and hostile acquisitions by noticing danger before anyone else admitted it existed. She told herself that was what she was doing now, protecting a woman whose judgment had become uncertain. Yet when she imagined Daniel standing in the workshop, she felt an irritation that was more personal than professional. Victoria listened to him without negotiating, and Linda could not remember the last time she had been able to command that kind of attention from her own boss.
Linda Whitfield did not decide to test Daniel Brooks in one dramatic moment. Her suspicion grew through ordinary meetings, unanswered questions, and the small humiliations of realizing that her influence over Victoria was no longer absolute. For nearly a decade, Linda had been the person who anticipated