"Daniel. Nice to meet you." He asked whether her mother knew she was outside, and Lily said yes, or at least Catherine had seen her come through the kitchen. Daniel told her she could watch if she stayed behind the cones and never reached toward tools without asking first. Lily accepted those conditions with the seriousness of someone who preferred clear rules to unexplained orders.
She watched him mix concrete for several minutes before disappearing inside. Daniel assumed she had lost interest, but she returned with a plate holding a turkey sandwich, a folded napkin, and a glass of water full of ice. "I made three sandwiches," she explained. "There are only two people here for lunch, and Mom usually forgets to eat hers." Daniel had brought his own lunch, as he always did, but refusing this offering seemed more complicated than accepting it.
"Thank you," he said, taking the plate with clean hands. Lily observed with satisfaction that he set down his tools before touching the food, and he guessed she had learned that expectation from a household in which everything had its proper place. He stood beside the truck while eating, careful not to bring crumbs into the fresh footing holes. Lily settled on the back step and watched him without pretending she needed another reason to be outdoors.
"Do you have kids?" she asked. "One," Daniel said. "A son, nine years old." Lily pointed at his thermos, where a bright Minecraft sticker had begun curling at one corner. "I guessed from that," she said. Noah had chosen the sticker during a rainy Saturday at the hardware store and applied it with his tongue caught between his teeth in concentration.
Daniel explained that Noah sometimes accompanied him on short jobs after school and could probably deliver an unsolicited lecture about galvanized steel. Lily brightened and asked if Noah liked mathematics. He loved it, Daniel said, especially when he could disagree with someone about the right way to reach an answer. "Then we might get along," Lily replied. "I need someone to settle an argument about whether fractions are more useful than decimals."
She spoke with easy confidence when the subject was numbers, but the confidence changed when Daniel asked what she liked besides mathematics. "Drawing," she said, then hesitated. "I used to draw at my mom's office. Before she stopped taking me." He told her she was allowed to explain that if she wanted and equally allowed not to explain it.
Lily stared across the yard. "When Dad first left, she used to take me with her because she didn't want me alone with a sitter all day. I had a little place in the conference room and she came to check on me between meetings. Exactly every forty minutes." Lily could still remember the shape of the conference table and the blue marker she had used to draw birds on scrap invoices. Then the company grew, the meetings grew longer, and Catherine decided that at nine years old Lily could stay home with a housekeeper checking in.