"Good news?" she asked when she saw his expression. Marcus looked at her. "Maybe," he said. "Someone thinks I might be able to fix machines at work again."
Emma smiled as though the result had been obvious all along. "You already know how," she said. "They just have to let you show them."
He laughed, reached across the table, and tapped the end of her nose with one finger. "That's part of it, sweetheart," he said. "The other part is making sure I keep showing up for the things that matter." Emma held out her little finger, and Marcus hooked his around it.
They had been making the same promise for four years, long before either of them had a word for the kind of life they were trying to build. The skills assessment took place the following Tuesday in a maintenance training room on the twelfth floor. Marcus arrived fifteen minutes early, wearing a clean blue work shirt without any company logo and carrying a small notebook in which he had copied the names of systems he wanted to understand better. It had been years since someone had formally tested his abilities, and his hands felt unusually dry when he signed the visitor sheet. He had fixed machines under pressure without blinking, but the prospect of being evaluated by strangers still reached an old, uncomfortable place inside him.
Olivia Grant from human resources met him at the door. She was practical, direct, and careful with language that could become part of an employment record. Beside her stood Peter Lang and Leila Sayeed, the building-controls engineer who had taken the temperature readings on the night of the conference-room failure. The three of them made a point of explaining that the assessment was not designed to give anyone a free pass around licensing or safety qualifications.
"We're looking at diagnostic reasoning, basic electrical knowledge, and your ability to work within the limits of your authorization," Peter said. "You won't be asked to perform unsafe live work or invent an answer you don't know. If you don't know, say so." Marcus felt his shoulders relax slightly. That was, he thought, a better examination than one that rewarded a confident guess.
The first station was a training panel with a simulated motor-control fault. A green indicator showed power available, but the fan refused to start. Marcus asked to see the wiring diagram, traced the intended sequence, and checked the input conditions before making any test connections. He found a safety switch that was not reporting its state correctly and described how he would confirm the diagnosis without bypassing the protection.
Peter nodded, then moved him to a second station where a programmable controller reported an intermittent communication fault. Marcus understood the physical components but was unfamiliar with the current protocol and interface. He tried to reason through the network diagram for several minutes, then stopped. "I know how to check whether the device has power and whether the physical connection is sound," he said. "After that, I'd need training on this software before I gave anyone a reliable answer."