Celeste laughed through tears. "I believe you. I'd be very grateful to try them someday if she ever wanted me to."
Footsteps approached from behind. Ruby had decided she could not stand the thought of her sister talking to strangers without backup, especially strangers who were apparently their own grandparents. She came down the aisle with her chin lifted, Daniel walking beside her and Derek Hale following a few steps back.
"You," Ruby said when she reached Richard.
Richard looked up. He seemed unsure what response would be safe. "Hello, Ruby."
"You said our somebody should've been there on time," she said. "You said you didn't see anybody with us. But we weren't nobody's children. Daddy was coming. His plane was late, and that wasn't his fault."
Richard sat very still. He had been prepared for adult criticism, for an argument about rules, and for Daniel's cold disappointment. He had not prepared for a nine-year-old to quote his own words back to him with such perfect memory.
"You're right," he said quietly. "I should not have said that."
"And Pearl was right about the watch," Ruby added. She took Daniel's left hand and held it gently beside Richard's wrist on the shared armrest. Two square gold watch faces caught the cabin light, surrounded by identical borders of tiny golden squares. Pearl gasped as though seeing a familiar picture finally revealed in full.
Richard stared at the watches side by side. His mother had given him the older one after Henry died, telling him to remember that the Ashford name had been built by people who understood duty, not merely status. He had worn it through contracts and funerals, promotions and family arguments, until it became part of how he saw himself. The matching watch on Daniel's wrist had become a reminder of the one person who had disagreed with that vision and left.
Ruby turned Daniel's wrist so the engraving showed. "It says, 'For Daniel, the man who will make it better,'" she read slowly. "Grandma Pearl wrote that, didn't she?"
"She did," Daniel answered.
Richard did not need to turn his own watch over. He knew the words engraved on the back: For Henry, the man who started this family. He also remembered his mother's voice, weak but determined in the hospital room where he had last seen her alive. She had held his hand and told him he was wrong about Grace and wrong about Daniel, and that time was running out to fix it.
He had told her he did not want to discuss the matter. She had looked at him with a sorrow he still could not forget, and he had left the room believing there would be another conversation. There had not been one. He had carried that final exchange for seven years, always finding reasons to think about it later.
"She told me," Richard said, his voice barely audible. "Before she died, she told me I was wrong. I was angry that she wouldn't let it go, and I told her I didn't want to hear it. Those were the last words I said to her."