understand the difference between coverage and authorization. He had even heard it from himself during the hardest months after Sarah's death, when he looked at the jobs he had taken and wondered whether he was giving Noah enough. His hands had kept the roof dry, the lights on, and dinner warm, but some part of him still worried that the world measured a father's worth by a different set of numbers.
Noah appeared in the doorway just before nine, carrying a book. "Dad, are you upset?"
Daniel considered lying. "A little."
"At me?"
"Never for asking a question."
"Did something happen at the job?"
"Somebody said something unkind. She apologized. I still need a little time."
Noah climbed into the chair across from him. "You always tell me apologizing doesn't make the thing unhappen. It just means you're telling the truth about it."
"That's right."
"So you can still be sad."
Daniel looked at his son and felt an ache so tender it almost resembled joy. "Yes, Professor. I can still be sad."
Noah thought about that, then opened his book and began reading aloud from the page he had marked. It was a chapter about a bridge designed to carry more weight than its builders expected. Daniel listened until Noah grew sleepy and the words began to blur. After tucking him into bed, he returned to the kitchen and opened his account notebook, not because the numbers had changed but because they were something he could put in order.
Across Whitfield Hollow, Catherine sat in the office she had built into the quiet end of the house. The screen before her displayed a shareholder presentation she had not revised in days. Normally she could find a problem in a spreadsheet and work until dawn solving it. Tonight, every number seemed to sit beside Daniel's face when she had called him a handyman as though that were a limit on the kind of person he was allowed to be.
Lily knocked on the open door. "Mom?"
"Come in."
"Did you and Daniel have a fight?"
Catherine turned away from the screen. She had hoped the children had not heard, but Lily's eyes told her that hope was already gone. The old instinct rose at once, urging her to explain that she was under stress, that Richard had come unexpectedly, that things were complicated. She stopped herself before any of those explanations could become an excuse.
"I said something cruel to him," Catherine answered. "I was angry and frightened, and I spoke to him as if his work made him less important than me. He didn't deserve it."
Lily looked at the floor. "He didn't do anything wrong."
"I know."
"Are you going to fix it?"
Catherine thought of the posts outside, the rot inside the old wood, and the way Daniel had insisted on removing the damage before covering it with new mesh. "I'm going to try," she said. "But he gets to decide how he feels about it."
Lily nodded slowly. "That sounds like what he'd say."