Victoria listened, took notes, and resisted the urge to explain the financial reason behind every earlier decision. The machinist had been hesitant when he entered, but by the end he was pointing out a structural weakness on a full-sized prototype with the confidence of someone who had finally been asked a question that mattered. Ethan, standing near the door, watched his employer and recognized something that had been absent for years. She was no longer waiting to speak. She was listening to understand.
Among the prototypes was a clean-lined oak cabinet from Sterling Living's heritage collection. Its design had remained almost unchanged for more than a decade, an unusual success in an industry driven by novelty. Victoria loved the piece because it had been one of the first products customers associated with the company's identity. Its drawers appeared to float beneath the top, and the side panels met at angles so restrained that many people overlooked how carefully they had been engineered.
She asked Priya about the original designer. Priya consulted her records and found that the design had entered the product catalog through an acquisition of a small independent studio years earlier. The digital archive named the studio but not an individual. There were notes about licensing, production rights, and later manufacturing modifications, yet no clear record of who had drawn the original concept.
"Find out," Victoria said. "If we're going to celebrate our heritage, I'd like to know whose work it actually was."
Priya agreed, not realizing that the question would lead her to a man whose workshop stood under sycamore trees on the other side of the city. The design team began pulling archived drawings from storage, and a week later Ethan brought Victoria a folder of scanned sketches. The original pages were yellowed, their edges marked with tape and old pencil measurements. Victoria recognized the style before she recognized the handwriting.
The drawings were careful without being ornamental. Every curve served a purpose; every joint had been considered from the perspective of someone assembling or using the piece. On the margin of the third page, beneath a measurement, a note had been written in small block letters: Leave room for wood to move. A second note asked whether the back panel could be removed for repair without destroying the cabinet.
Victoria had seen the same lettering on Daniel's estimates and the small tags he attached to repaired furniture. She turned the pages more slowly. In the lower right corner of an early drawing was a name that had been partially covered when the archive was scanned, but enough remained to read it. D. Brooks.
Ethan saw her expression. "Is something wrong?"
"No," she said. "I think something very important has been missing from our records."
The archival trail led to a defunct design firm called Alden & Rowe, where Daniel had worked in his twenties. The firm's assets and licenses had been sold during a difficult financial period, and Sterling Living had acquired a portfolio of approved designs through a later transaction. The contracts appeared to give the company legal rights to manufacture the furniture, but the public-facing catalog had never credited the designers whose work formed its foundation. In a way that had become common across the industry, individual names had disappeared as companies merged, rebranded, and updated their product lines.