He sat on the edge of the visitor chair and worked quietly for a minute. When he showed her the answer, she nodded. “There. You knew the process. You only needed to find the step where it stopped making sense.”
Mason looked at his father as though something improbable had happened. “She explains it better.”
“Apparently,” Ethan said, half laughing.
Mason went back to the break room with the triumphant restraint of a boy determined not to appear impressed. Ethan watched the door close and tried not to think about the way his son's shoulders had relaxed. The crayon drawing pinned to the bulletin board was one of Mason's, a bright blue truck with tires almost as large as its body. His wife, Sarah, had taped it there when Mason was younger, and Ethan had never been able to take it down. The boy was nine now, and some mornings Ethan could barely believe how long he had been raising him alone.
Five and a half years earlier, Sarah had been alive, managing the front office whenever her schedule allowed and laughing at his habit of losing every invoice he touched. They had planned to hire help when the shop grew, put aside money for a better house, and take Mason camping when he was old enough to remember it. Then there had been a diagnosis, consultations, medical appointments, and a long decline through which Sarah insisted on being treated like a whole person instead of a list of symptoms. After her death, Ethan had kept the garage open because closing it would have meant losing the only part of their future he still knew how to protect.
He worked fourteen-hour days and told himself the exhaustion was temporary. Mason spent school vacations in the break room and learned to recognize trucks by their engines, sometimes before he recognized the people driving them. Ethan made dinner, packed lunches, signed forms, and pretended not to notice when his son asked whether another family would be at an event. The shop survived, but survival consumed everything he had. The office became a monument to tasks postponed for a day when he might have enough energy to face them.
Claire did not know any of that yet. She finished sorting the first stack and returned to the interview sheet. “Can you tell me exactly what the daily responsibilities are, and which decisions I'd be authorized to make without asking you?”
He thought about it. “I need somebody to run the office, handle customers, keep the records straight, and stop me from forgetting things that cost money. I'd want to approve major expenditures and anything that changes how repairs are done. Otherwise, if it makes the office function, I'd rather you handle it than wait for me.”
“Good. Then authority needs to match responsibility.” She tucked one loose invoice back into its folder. “If I'm accountable for receivables, I need permission to contact customers. If I'm accountable for parts tracking, I need access to vendor accounts. I'd rather agree on boundaries now than argue about them in front of a customer later.”