He remembered Elliot, too, although he rarely spoke about him. Elliot had been a wiry engineer with an uneven haircut, a cracked watch, and an odd talent for making exhausted people feel they were doing something necessary. He could spend an hour explaining a design to a skeptical hospital administrator and then another hour helping Daniel drag a broken cabinet to the curb. When the first big contract finally arrived, Elliot celebrated by ordering pizza for everyone on the premises, including the courier who had brought the signed agreement. Daniel never forgot that detail.
Victoria Grant was Elliot's daughter, but she had inherited an entirely different version of the company. She had studied economics, worked in corporate strategy, and spent years proving she could manage organizations much larger than the one her father had started. When Elliot's health declined, she returned to oversee a complicated transition that involved demanding investors, new board members, and an expensive restructuring. By the time he died, the company's revenue had multiplied several times. Victoria told herself that protecting what he had built required a kind of discipline he had never possessed.
She was forty-four, decisive, and rarely uncertain in front of other people. She arrived early, remembered numbers without opening her notes, and could identify a weakness in a financial projection from across a conference table. Her employees respected her results, though most took care not to disagree with her in public. She was not careless about the company's future. She was careless, increasingly, about the people whose daily work made that future possible.
When she was younger, her father had once brought her to the original workshop during a summer vacation. She remembered a humid afternoon, an open garage door, and a young maintenance