Catherine swallowed. "That sounds like enough to begin with."
"It's enough for me."
Noah stirred on the couch and called for his father in a sleepy, uncertain voice. Daniel squeezed Catherine's hand once and went to him. He sat on the edge of the couch, brushed his son's hair away from his forehead, and told him he was there. Noah settled almost immediately, his fingers closing for a moment around the sleeve of Daniel's shirt.
When Daniel returned to the kitchen, Catherine was still at the table. She had not moved to her computer or picked up her phone. She had waited. Daniel sat beside her rather than across from her, and they drank the rest of their tea in a silence that no longer needed to prove anything.
The next week moved with the peculiar tension of a decision approaching. Catherine spoke with the last two shareholders, answered questions about contracts the board wanted to sell, and met with counsel to challenge misleading material in the proxy package. She did not ask Daniel for a daily report or turn him into an unpaid campaign manager. She called when she wanted to talk, sometimes about the company and sometimes about nothing important at all, and he learned how to tell the difference.
Daniel went to work, collected Noah from school, prepared dinners, and tried to remember that his happiness was allowed to exist alongside uncertainty. Some evenings he looked at Sarah's photograph and felt a wave of guilt he could not entirely explain. He spoke about it once with Walter, an older neighbor who had known him before Sarah became ill. Walter told him that loving someone after loss did not rewrite the story that came before it.
"Sarah loved the man who showed up," Walter said. "She didn't marry you so you'd spend the rest of your life standing in the same place after she was gone."
Daniel listened without speaking. He had forgotten how often Walter could say something difficult without making it sound like a command. That night, when he tucked Noah into bed, he asked whether the boy remembered how his mother had made pancakes on Sundays. Noah grinned and reminded him about the time she used salt instead of sugar. They laughed until Noah was too tired to continue.
Daniel went to bed knowing the past had not been taken from him by the possibility of a future. It was a small but necessary realization. He woke the next morning and made breakfast, and when Noah asked why he was smiling, he told him the eggs had come out right. Noah studied the plate and declared that an inadequate explanation.
On Wednesday afternoon, nine days before the scheduled shareholder vote, Daniel was finishing a repair to the steps of an old porch in Whitfield Hollow when Catherine called. He had spent the morning replacing a damaged beam, and the last board was resting loosely across the opening while he checked the level beneath it. He recognized her name at once and set down the tool before answering, not wanting to speak to her while balancing on an unfinished step. The sun was low, and his shirt was damp with the ordinary exhaustion of a day spent doing physical work carefully.