Victoria felt a slow flush of embarrassment. She had built a company selling furniture designed to help people live comfortably, yet she had nearly insisted that the only meaningful way to honor Daniel's talent was to make his life more like hers. She closed the folder and put it aside. "Then I won't ask again," she said. "The attribution work can continue separately, with your consent. That is a correction we should make because it's true, not because you agree to a job."
"I'd appreciate that," he said. He smiled toward the old cabinet beside his bench. "And if you ever have a particular chair that needs fixing, you know where to find me. I do charge paying customers, by the way."
Victoria laughed. "I've been wondering whether that was allowed." He laughed with her, relieved that the conversation could end without either person feeling defeated.
The company's archive project expanded over the following months. It identified dozens of designers, cabinetmakers, upholsterers, and production teams whose contributions had been compressed into anonymous corporate labels. Victoria approved updated credits for future catalogs where records supported them and asked Miriam to review whether any contracts required additional compensation. In some cases they did, and the company corrected the omissions. In others the agreements had properly transferred the rights, but the human story could still be told more honestly without pretending the legal arrangement had been different.
Daniel gave permission for his name to appear in the history of the Alder House collection. He declined a publicity campaign around his discovery, refusing to become the face of a feel-good story about a humble workman secretly responsible for corporate success. "There were other people on that team," he reminded Victoria. "Don't make them disappear while you're correcting my disappearance." She promised she would not. It was the kind of instruction she realized she needed to hear precisely because it would never have occurred to her in her old approach to publicity.
One afternoon, an apprentice from the Sterling design studio visited Daniel's workshop after reading the updated collection notes. Her name was Lena Foster, and she was fresh out of school, full of doubts about whether her ideas were any good. She wanted to understand how the cabinets had been drawn before computer modeling dominated the process. Daniel showed her an old paper template and let her hold the wooden form he once used to test a joint. He did not treat her questions as evidence of ignorance.
"See this?" he said, pointing to a line that differed from the final product. "I tried this shape because I thought it looked elegant. Then we built it, and it caught people's sleeves every time they walked past. So we changed it."
Lena laughed. Daniel continued, "The lesson isn't that I was clever enough to draw the final version. The lesson is that we tested the first one, listened to what the furniture told us, and did better."