"Not driving?" she asked.
"Not mainly driving. Working with companies in different countries, helping them make agreements. A little like what I used to do."
She studied his face. "Would you have to go away?"
There it was, the same question she had asked in smaller words when she was four. Daniel pulled out the chair beside her. "Not if I take it. That's one of the things I'm going to make sure of before I agree."
"But they might want you to."
"They might. And if they do, I can say no."
She looked at the proposed job title. "Senior advisory. Is that a big deal?"
"It could be."
"Do you want it?"
Daniel considered the question with more care than he had given the salary. "I liked the work today," he said. "I liked helping people understand one another. I had forgotten how much. But I like being here with you more, and I don't want to have to choose between them."
Sophie looked relieved and thoughtful at once. "Maybe you can teach them how to use video calls."
He laughed. "They do have video calls."
"Then maybe you can teach them that people on video calls still count as being at the meeting."
Daniel stared at her for a moment. It was an eleven-year-old's solution, simple enough that a boardroom full of experts might have overlooked it. He remembered what he had told her about engineering: notice the problem people have learned to ignore. He put an arm around her shoulders.
"That," he said, "is a very good idea, Chief Engineer."
Later, after she had gone to bed, he sat alone with the folder and a calculator. He made two columns on a notepad. In the first he wrote practical things: salary, benefits, medical insurance, travel limits, after-school coverage, vacation, taxes, job stability. In the second he wrote questions he had spent years avoiding: Did he still believe he could be useful in that world? Could he trust himself not to chase every opportunity once the old excitement returned? Would he know when ambition became absence again? The lists did not answer one another, but seeing them side by side was a start.
He took Rachel's photograph from the small shelf near the kitchen window. She was laughing in a blue sweater at a park, one hand holding Sophie's baby hat against the wind. Daniel told the photograph nothing. He did not believe Rachel had left him instructions hidden inside memories. He knew she had wanted him to live rather than turn their loss into a lifelong restriction, and he knew she would have challenged him if he used devotion to Sophie as an excuse never to take a risk again. The problem was finding a risk that belonged to him without taking too much from their daughter.
The next morning, his phone rang at seven fifteen. Jessie Monroe was calling from the fleet office.
"Daniel, what on earth happened yesterday?" she demanded, without greeting him. "I got a call from Bennett's executive office, another from their legal department, and an email from HR asking if your contract has any restrictions on direct hiring. I thought somebody had scratched the Navigator."