Before hanging up Catherine asked if Lily could call Noah about the fractions argument. Daniel told her Noah would welcome the challenge and handed the phone to his son. For ten minutes the two children argued about mathematical representations while Daniel folded Sarah's note and returned it to the drawer. Outside his kitchen window, the backyard fence he had repaired the previous spring stood straight despite the rain that had begun to fall.
Sunday was quiet enough that Daniel found himself listening for work that did not exist. He changed a filter in the furnace, tightened the handle on Noah's bedroom drawer, and sorted a box of screws that had become a small archaeological record of ten years of repairs. Noah occupied the living room floor with his bridge project and periodically announced another theory about what made a structure strong. Daniel answered each one, although he recognized that his son was mainly interested in having an audience.
After lunch they walked to the park with a soccer ball and a thermos of coffee. Daniel sat on a bench while Noah joined a pickup game with three other children, then stood to referee when an argument broke out over whether the ball had crossed an imaginary line. The ordinary afternoon was its own kind of wealth: a child running without fear, neighbors saying hello, no bill arriving in the mail before dinner. Daniel had spent so many years thinking about what he could not afford that he occasionally needed reminding of what he already had.
Catherine did not call. He had half expected she might and was relieved when she did not, because their conversation on Saturday had given both of them something to consider. He was not interested in becoming the person she contacted only when her life was falling apart. The attraction between them, whatever form it eventually took, would need to exist on a Tuesday afternoon when there was nothing urgent to repair.
Across Whitfield Hollow, Catherine spent Sunday at her dining room table surrounded by financial records. She had ordered copies of every board packet issued during the previous year, along with the original investment documents and minutes from meetings she could still remember almost word for word. Her legal adviser, Monica Reed, had warned her not to confuse stubbornness with leverage. Catherine knew Monica was right, but she also knew that a company could be taken away through the slow manipulation of information long before anyone voted on the final motion.
She built Hail Systems after watching a hospital lose critical time because equipment, staffing schedules, and supply deliveries existed in separate systems that did not communicate. Her mother had worked as a respiratory therapist, and Catherine spent enough afternoons waiting outside hospital wards to understand that efficiency was not a fashionable business word when a patient needed a machine that somebody had misplaced. The first version of her software was ugly, unreliable, and sometimes held together by manually checked spreadsheets. It also solved a real problem.