By four o'clock, the bank had been notified, the relevant cards had been frozen, and security personnel had begun checking footage from the building's entrance. Ethan had arranged replacement documents and drafted a list of calls requiring her authorization. Victoria signed what he placed in front of her with a hand that had regained its professional steadiness. She said she understood that the wallet was almost certainly gone forever, although she did not believe it.
At Sterling Living headquarters, the executive suite was still celebrating. A bottle of champagne waited unopened on her desk, beside a congratulatory note from a director in London and a basket of white lilies from the company's newest investment partner. Linda Whitfield, the deputy director, called to say that several business publications wanted exclusive interviews about the deal. Victoria told Ethan to decline them for the evening, then stood alone by her office window long after the last assistant had left.
Linda would later say that Victoria had seemed distracted by something too small to justify her mood. It was an opinion consistent with the way Linda saw most things. Problems involving contracts, reputations, or balance sheets deserved attention; problems involving sentiment were meant to be contained. Victoria had once agreed with her almost completely, and that was part of what frightened her now.
That same morning, in a neighborhood twenty minutes beyond the glittering downtown streets, Daniel Brooks had been working on an oak dining table with a scar through its center. He was thirty-eight, with dark hair beginning to gray above his ears, steady brown eyes, and hands marked by years of careful work. His workshop stood beside a small wooden house beneath two sycamore trees. When he opened the double doors, the first light of day moved across stacks of reclaimed boards, old clamps, jars of screws, and furniture in various stages of being given another chance.
The table belonged to a retired schoolteacher who had inherited it from her mother. A moving crew had split the top while shifting it into an apartment, and two larger repair shops had suggested replacing it entirely. Daniel had looked beneath the damaged surface, found that the supporting frame remained sound, and told the woman he could preserve almost all the original wood. She had cried with relief, then apologized for crying over a table.
Daniel had not told her there was anything foolish about it. He had simply asked how many people had eaten dinner there. When she said four generations, he had nodded and said that seemed like a good reason to fix it properly. He understood that objects often became the places people stored their memories when there was nowhere else to put them.