He returned later that afternoon with a single printed page. Daniel Brooks owned a small furniture restoration workshop attached to his home. The business had a modest listing, a handful of customer photographs, and reviews praising his reliability, patience, and unwillingness to promise results he could not deliver. One customer wrote that Daniel had repaired a child's rocking chair her grandfather made, and had refused to charge for the extra hours because he believed the chair deserved to be safe. Another said he had returned an overpayment three weeks after the job was complete, accompanied by a handwritten note explaining the corrected invoice.
There was no polished website filled with flattering photographs of the proprietor. His phone number appeared below a line asking customers to leave a message if he was working with noisy equipment. Victoria read the testimonials twice. She recognized that they had not been written for her benefit and were unlikely to have been fabricated by a man who did not know she would ever look. More disturbing, they described a version of integrity that she had nearly stopped expecting from businesses of any size.
"I'd like to send flowers," she said. Ethan raised an eyebrow. "To a workshop?" Victoria considered that.
The thought of a towering arrangement sitting among wood shavings and hand tools made her smile despite herself. "Perhaps not. A letter, then." She wrote it by hand, an activity so unfamiliar that she searched three drawers before finding stationery not already printed with her company letterhead.
She began with three formal sentences and crossed out every one of them. Finally she wrote that the ring had belonged to her mother, that its return meant more than she had managed to express, and that Daniel had restored something she had believed permanently lost. She added that she understood and respected his decision about the reward. She did not invite him to the mansion or include another offer. When she finished, she realized she had not written a personal letter in years.
Daniel received it on Friday between two customers and a visit from Alice Pruitt, his seventy-six-year-old neighbor. Alice entered his workshop without knocking, as she usually did when the door stood open, and set down a paper bag containing two still-warm biscuits. "You're forgetting lunch again," she said. Daniel held up an apple beside his workbench.
Alice gave it a disapproving glance. "That's what you eat because you're too stubborn to stop long enough for lunch. It isn't the same thing."