The institute's director, a practical woman named Rebecca Sloan, asked him during their final meeting what had brought him to this kind of work. Callan told her about Hannah's question concerning the grandmother waiting for her pension. Rebecca listened, then asked whether he could build programs that people without engineering degrees could understand.
"That's what I've been trying to do for years," he said.
"Good," she replied. "Most of our partners cannot afford a beautiful answer they don't know how to use."
He went home with an offer letter, a bag of groceries, and the rare pleasure of feeling that the next chapter of his life belonged partly to him.
June celebrated by insisting they order pizza with mushrooms on one half and olives on the other. They ate on the living-room floor with the repaired bridge on the coffee table beside them. Mrs. Morales came over with homemade cookies, declared the new job a sensible decision, and told Callan his mother would have been proud if she had lived to see how he had handled everything. His mother, who had died before June was born, had indeed been a woman who admired quiet persistence. He thanked Elena, feeling the familiar mixture of gratitude and sadness that came when someone remembered a person he could no longer call.
Later, while June was sleeping, he opened a box containing Hannah's old notebooks. One was filled with lesson plans and drawings from her students. Another held recipes she had written down on scraps of paper, often with odd comments in the margins. A third contained a list of small adventures she hoped they would take as a family. Some were extravagant, like a trip to Italy when June was old enough to remember it. Others were simple: see the stars outside the city, eat pancakes for dinner on a Tuesday, learn to swim together, visit the ocean in winter.
He sat with that notebook open for a long time. Grief had taught him how to survive without Hannah. It had not told him how to imagine wanting a future that included someone new. For months after her death, any possibility of another relationship had felt like a betrayal. Later, it had seemed impossible for practical reasons. There was too much laundry, too little sleep, and a small child whose sense of safety deserved more attention than his own loneliness.
He had not seriously considered dating. Yet once or twice in recent weeks, when Vivian's name appeared in a professional email or he passed a news interview featuring her, he felt a quiet pull of curiosity that was not about the company. He wondered what she was like when no one needed a decision from her. Whether she ever laughed without measuring the consequences. Whether she had anybody who reminded her to eat dinner at a reasonable hour. He told himself the thoughts would pass. He also knew they had arrived only because she had treated him like a person when treating him like a useful employee would have been easier.