in only some rooms. Daniel made oatmeal, found the missing lid for her lunch container, and repaired a loose connection in her project with the concentration of a man defusing an explosive. When Sophie wandered into the kitchen, barefoot and half asleep, he held up the little cardboard structure she had been building and asked whether the red light was supposed to blink twice or three times.
"Three," she said. "If it blinks twice, the crossing signal is wrong."
"Three it is. Any other specifications from the engineering department?"
"You're supposed to call me chief engineer."
"Sorry, Chief Engineer."
She tried not to smile. The project was a model pedestrian crossing with a button, miniature lights, and a buzzer meant to warn people who could not see the signal. She had chosen it after watching a man with a white cane wait too long at an intersection near their school. Daniel had told her that good engineering usually began when someone noticed a problem other people had learned to ignore. She had written that sentence in her notebook and underlined the word noticed twice.
Before leaving, he checked the envelope marked BRACES in the kitchen drawer. It contained a few hundred dollars and a savings plan written on the back of an old grocery receipt. He had never told Sophie that the doctor had given him a second, less expensive treatment option because he had asked whether there was anything they could delay. She knew the finances were tight, though. Children understood more from a parent's hesitation at the checkout counter than adults liked to believe. When she hugged him goodbye, she whispered that he didn't have to buy the better batteries for the project because the old ones still worked most of the time.
"We'll get good batteries," Daniel promised. "Your project deserves to work."
"So do you, Dad."
He laughed, but the words stayed with him during the train ride downtown. On the platform, he saw his reflection in a dark window: gray at his temples, the collar of his only good work jacket carefully straightened, a man who had learned to travel with a packed lunch and a spare phone charger. There had been a time when that reflection wore tailored suits and moved through airports with a company card that opened every lounge. There had also been a time when he could explain why an executive in Tokyo had paused before agreeing to a term, or why the same sentence sounded reassuring in English but threatening in a Japanese boardroom. Neither skill paid the rent today. Driving did.
His wife, Rachel, had died seven years earlier. Sophie had been four, young enough to ask the same questions again and again but old enough to remember the way her mother's voice sounded when she sang while washing dishes. In the first year after Rachel's death, Daniel had tried to maintain the career