"She's known you a long time?" Victoria asked.
"Since I moved here with Claire. Alice brought a casserole before we'd unpacked the kitchen."
"Claire?"
Daniel looked into his tea. "My wife. She died five years ago."
Victoria set down her mug. "I'm sorry."
"Thank you." He gave her a moment to absorb the information rather than moving quickly past it. "She was the one who taught me to look at old furniture as something worth saving. I used to be impatient with anything that wasn't perfect."
For the first time that evening, Victoria forgot the excuse she had considered in the car. She asked what Claire had loved, and Daniel told her about estate sales in church basements, about a dining chair found beneath a tarp during a rainstorm, and about a Sunday afternoon spent rebuilding a broken chest while the two of them argued over whether the new handles should match the originals. He spoke without trying to make his marriage sound ideal. They had argued over money, late hours, and whether he took too many jobs he didn't need. They had also been very happy.
"She saw possibility in things other people threw away," he said. "I knew how to draw something new. She knew how to look at something old and ask why it had been abandoned."
Victoria glanced toward the unfinished rocker. "And now that's what you do."
"Part of it. I also need to pay the electric bill."
She laughed unexpectedly. Daniel looked pleased by the sound, then returned to his tea. He did not ask about her company's value, the deal she had signed, or whether the ring had been expensive. His lack of interest in her status might once have offended her. Instead, she found herself relieved.
They talked until the light began to leave the windows. Victoria learned that he preferred strong coffee but made tea for visitors, that he collected old woodworking manuals, and that the sycamore tree outside the kitchen had survived two storms that brought down neighboring branches. Daniel learned that her mother had once insisted on repairing clothes instead of replacing them, and that Victoria could remember every stage of a corporate negotiation but no longer remembered how to spend an afternoon without looking at a clock.
"You could practice," he said.
"Practice what?"
"Sitting through an afternoon. Not making it productive."
"That sounds terrible for someone who runs a business."
"Might be useful for the person who goes home afterward."
She regarded him thoughtfully. It was not a compliment and not an insult. He had simply separated a role from the person performing it, a distinction she rarely allowed herself. When she stood to leave, the tea had gone cold and her phone held seven messages, none urgent enough to have required her attention at the moment they arrived.