Victoria brought copies of the early drawings to Daniel's workshop with his permission. He looked at the first page and laughed softly, almost in embarrassment. "I haven't seen that one in years. Look at those proportions.
I was trying to be clever instead of practical." He turned to a second sheet, tracing a faint pencil mark near the corner. "Claire helped me test that drawer. She said if a person couldn't open it with one hand while holding a cup of tea, it wasn't finished."
"You designed a line that's still sold around the world," Victoria said. "Did you know that?" Daniel shrugged. "I knew a version of it was still around.
I'd see something familiar in a showroom now and then. It didn't always look quite the way I remembered, which is what happens when hundreds of people keep working on a design." She watched him turn the pages. There was no bitterness in his voice, but neither was he indifferent to the work.
He told her about his first years at Caldwell. He had arrived with a degree in architectural design, a head full of ideas, and the firm belief that good work would eventually speak for itself. His supervisor admired his drawings but preferred presenting them to clients under the studio's name. At twenty-six, Daniel accepted that as the structure of the business. He expected to have many years to establish his own reputation, and he was less interested in arguing over credit than in seeing his ideas become furniture people actually used.
Then Claire became ill. He began taking leave to drive her to appointments, finishing designs late at night after she went to sleep. He missed an important presentation when she was hospitalized unexpectedly, and the studio assigned the project to another team. A merger followed, contracts were reorganized, and he eventually left under terms that were straightforward on paper but complicated in memory. By the time Claire died, the path back to the career he once wanted felt impossibly distant.
"I didn't leave because someone stole my future," he said when Victoria asked whether he regretted it. "People were doing their jobs, the company changed, and life happened. Some people handled it kindly. Others didn't.
I wasn't in a place where I could fight for a name on a drawing, and afterward the fight stopped feeling important." He placed one page beside a cedar chair he was repairing. "It matters that the work helped someone, though. I haven't forgotten that."
Victoria considered how to tell him that she wanted to correct the record without making him feel that he was being offered a consolation prize. She had expected him to be furious or thrilled. Instead he seemed reflective, occasionally pleased to see an old idea survive, occasionally embarrassed by its youthful excesses. The past did not offer the tidy drama of a lost genius waiting to reclaim his throne. It offered a person who had made difficult choices and lived with them long enough to become someone else.