That night, Sadie came home unexpectedly. Her semester had a short break, and she had borrowed a friend's car to make the drive. Mason opened the front door to find her standing beneath the porch light with a backpack, a travel mug, and the same determined expression Rebecca used to wear when she had already made a plan. He told her she should have called first, and she said that would have given him an opportunity to insist she stay at school.
They ate leftover pasta at the kitchen table and talked about ordinary things for almost an hour. Sadie described a professor who made everyone redo a lab because the class had copied the wrong value from the reference sheet. Mason told her about a coworker who used to store pens in an empty bearing box because he distrusted office supply cabinets. They laughed more than either had expected, and for a while the scandal felt like something happening to another family.
Then Sadie asked whether the company would take him back. Mason said the question was complicated. He had loved the work even when the company treated him as invisible, but he did not know whether he could walk onto that floor under the same leadership and trust the records. Sadie looked around the familiar kitchen and said she could take a part-time job if money became difficult.
"Your first job is to learn how to be an engineer," he told her.
"And yours is to stop acting like you're the only person in this family allowed to worry about anybody else," she replied.
He opened his mouth to object, then saw Rebecca's stubbornness in her daughter's expression and smiled despite himself. They talked honestly about the savings, the mortgage, and what he could do if the dispute took months to resolve. Sadie insisted she would rather adjust her plans temporarily than watch him tell a lie to protect them. Mason promised not to turn financial anxiety into a secret she had to discover by accident.
Later that night, they went into the garage and found the old model aircraft Sadie had built at twelve. One wing remained crooked because she had cut its support a fraction too short, and Mason had refused to hide the error beneath extra paint. She picked it up, turned it over, and said the imperfection had bothered her for years. Mason told her that the flaw had taught her more than a perfect model would have, which was why he had kept it.
"You kept it because I'm your daughter," she said.
"Both things can be true," he answered.
She placed the model back on its shelf and asked what Rebecca would say about everything that had happened. Mason thought about the woman who had helped him through so many hard decisions and whose absence still shaped every room in the house. He said Rebecca would probably ask whether he had checked the measurement twice, then tell him to take out the trash before dinner. Sadie laughed, but there were tears in her eyes when she hugged him.