He made tea while Alice inspected the chair he had been repairing for her. The old rocker had belonged to her late husband, Frank, who once sat in it every Sunday afternoon reading the newspaper aloud in exaggerated voices. One runner had split, and Alice had spent months afraid to use the chair because she could not bear to see it break completely. Daniel had taken it apart carefully, found matching oak, and shaped the replacement to follow the worn curve of the original. He had refused her money before he had even begun.
"You keep doing jobs for free and you'll end up feeding yourself nothing but apples," Alice told him. "I ought to tell Claire on you." The name came easily between them, without the startled silence it caused when unfamiliar people used it. Alice had known Claire as a young bride and watched Daniel slowly return to life after the funeral. She had learned that speaking Claire's name was a kindness, not an injury. Daniel smiled faintly and poured her tea.
He found Victoria's letter later that afternoon, tucked inside an ordinary envelope among invoices and advertisements. He read it standing beside the window, then folded it and set it near the small wooden box where he kept important papers. The words were measured, but the handwriting became less steady near the sentence about her mother. He understood the effort it must have taken for a woman accustomed to formal correspondence to write without hiding behind professional language. He did not feel compelled to respond immediately, and that seemed to him perfectly acceptable.
Meanwhile, Victoria began discovering inconvenient facts about her own life. Her physician had suggested years earlier that she take proper days away from work, and she had answered that her days away were called airplanes. She had a personal chef who prepared meals according to a schedule, but she could not remember the last meal she had eaten without reading a document between bites. She owned an enormous collection of books, most chosen by a decorator after a brief discussion of her interests. When Ethan asked whether she intended to attend Saturday's charity luncheon, she realized she had no idea what she wanted to do instead.
The absence of an agenda frightened her more than she expected. Victoria had built Sterling Living by never leaving an hour unaccounted for. During its earliest years, when the company rented one cramped floor above a repair supply shop, every morning began with a list longer than she could reasonably complete. She loved those days in some ways, despite the exhaustion, because she was making something that had existed only in her imagination. As Sterling Living expanded, the lists became meetings and the meetings became obligations to people she rarely saw.
She had grown up in a modest house where Eleanor Sterling repaired furniture because replacing it cost money. Her father left when she was young, and the family managed on her mother's work as a school office administrator and occasional upholstery repairs. Victoria learned early to calculate which bills could wait and which could not. When a scholarship carried her through college, she treated financial security as a promise she would never again depend on another person's mercy. Ambition, for her, had begun as a form of protection.