I had refinished the dance floor for my best friend’s wedding, but four years after losing my wife, I couldn’t make myself step onto it. Then a woman in a black dress crossed the room and said, “Dance with me.” I didn’t recognize the tech CEO. The man watching us from the bar clearly did—and he wasn’t pleased…

I had refinished the dance floor for my best friend’s wedding, but four years after losing my wife, I couldn’t make myself step onto it. Then a woman in a black dress crossed the room and said, “Dance with me.” I didn’t recognize the tech CEO. The man watching us from the bar clearly did—and he wasn’t pleased…

I had spent the night before Marcus’s wedding refinishing three hundred square feet of reclaimed oak. By the reception, the floor looked beautiful, and I was doing everything possible to stay off it.

My name is Daniel Brooks. I was thirty-five, a furniture maker on Chicago’s South Side, with sawdust still caught in the sleeve of my dress shirt. I had built the ceremony arch, too, using wood from a barn that had burned on Marcus’s grandfather’s property.

Marcus Webb had been my friend since seventh grade. When he asked me to come, he made it clear that delivering the woodwork didn’t count. He wanted me to sit down, eat dinner, and be there for his wedding.

I promised. Then I found a place against the far wall and watched him spin his new wife around on the floor I’d brought back to life.

Four years earlier, I would have been out there. My wife, Clare, would have pulled me away from the wall, laughed at my footwork, and somehow made us look as though we knew what we were doing.

Pancreatic cancer took her three months after the diagnosis. Our daughter, Lily, was four then, old enough to understand that her mother wasn’t coming back and too young to understand why.

I kept working. I packed lunches, made deliveries, and got Lily where she needed to be. People told me I was holding up well until eventually they stopped asking how I was doing.

I had learned to keep my grief contained because my tears frightened my daughter. What I hadn’t learned was how to stop that containment from becoming the whole way I lived.

A waitress offered champagne. I declined, looking at the calluses across my palms. I didn’t want a conversation about my hands, my work, or what had brought me to a room where everyone seemed to know how to enjoy themselves.

My phone buzzed. Mrs. Okonquo, our neighbor, was watching Lily for the evening.

“Dinner eaten. Teeth brushed. Asked three times when Daddy was coming home. Sleeping now. Don’t rush.”

I read the last two words again. Lily had developed a worried crease between her eyebrows, one that sometimes disappeared only when she slept. I wondered how much of my worry she was carrying, even while I congratulated myself on keeping it from her.

When I looked up, I noticed an argument near the bar.

The man wore a good suit and a smile that didn’t match the conversation. The woman stood with her back partly toward me, her dark hair up, her posture carefully straight.

He reached for her arm. She stepped back. He leaned closer and said something I couldn’t hear, and her face changed just enough for me to recognize the exhaustion beneath it.

Then he lifted his drink and walked away.

She remained there for a moment before turning toward the room. I looked away, meaning to give her privacy. When I glanced back, she was walking straight toward me.

“You’ve been standing here almost an hour,” she said.

“That’s accurate.”

“You built the arch.”

I looked at her more carefully.

“How did you know?”

“You keep watching it like a parent watching a child on the first day of school.”

I hadn’t realized I was doing that. I introduced myself, and she told me her name was Victoria Sterling. It meant nothing to me then; my days revolved around Lily, commissions, and the workshop, and I wasn’t keeping up with technology executives.

She knew the bride through work. She also admitted she had almost stayed home.

“Me too,” I said.

“What made you stay?”

I nodded toward Marcus.

“I made a promise. He’s the kind of happy you don’t want to miss.”

She watched him for a moment.

“Even when it hurts?”

“Especially then.”

She held out her hand.

“Dance with me.”

I stared at it.

“I don’t dance.”

“I know. I’ve been watching you not dance for forty-five minutes.”

Then she admitted she was terrible at it, too. Someone had once told her she looked like a malfunctioning ATM.

I laughed before I could stop myself. It came out louder than I intended, and I felt embarrassed by how surprised I was to hear it.

“One song,” she said. “If it’s awful, we stop. You can go back to your wall.”

“It’s not my wall.”

“You’ve claimed it.”

I looked at her hand, then the floor. I thought of Lily asking when I would be home, of Marcus asking me to actually come to his wedding, of all the rooms I entered while keeping the part of me that mattered somewhere else.

I took her hand.

She stepped on my foot almost immediately. While trying to correct herself, she stepped on it again from another direction.

“That takes skill,” I said.

“Be respectful. I’m the CEO of a publicly traded company.”

I laughed properly that time. She looked pleased, even while concentrating on where her feet belonged.

Her company built software infrastructure, she explained—systems that helped other systems communicate. When I told her I made furniture, she said she knew.

Marcus had told her about me. About the arch, and why I had used that particular wood. About Clare, and how much effort it had taken for me to come that evening.

I went quiet.

“He talks too much.”

“He loves you.”

We moved awkwardly around the floor. I could see the grain beneath us catching the light, the boards I had worked on alone now supporting a roomful of people.

“Why did you come over to me?” I asked.

She took a moment to answer.

“You had the most honest face in the room.”

She said she had spent her week in meetings and formal dinners, surrounded by people trying to impress someone. I had looked like a person who was hurting and trying hard to keep anyone from noticing.

“I wanted to talk to someone real,” she said.

I looked down at our joined hands. Mine were rough, hers carefully manicured, and neither pair was doing much to improve the dancing.

“My wife was the dancer,” I told her. “I mostly stood next to her and moved around.”

“She sounds like she was good at making things easier.”

“Most things.” I swallowed. “She would have laughed at me standing against that wall.”

Victoria didn’t tell me Clare would want me to move on. She said it made sense that this was difficult. Clare had mattered, and beginning something new could feel frightening.

I hadn’t expected relief from a conversation with a stranger. But I could say her name without having to reassure the person listening that I was all right.

Two songs had passed when Victoria’s hand stiffened in mine. The man from the bar had appeared at the edge of the floor, looking directly at us.

“Victoria,” he said. “I didn’t realize you’d found company.”

Part 2…..

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“Preston,” she said, without smiling. “We finished our conversation.”

He introduced himself as Preston Hail and offered me his hand. When he asked what I did, I told him.

“Furniture. Custom work.”

“Ah.”

He turned back to Victoria as though that settled my place in the conversation. He said he would find her later. She told him there was nothing left to discuss.

When he walked away, she explained that his investment firm was one of her significant institutional investors. He believed that gave him a claim on her time and decisions beyond the business.

I knew the way he had looked at me. Some customers did it when they entered my workshop, taking inventory before I had said a word. That evening, for once, I found I didn’t much care where a man like that placed me.

“One more song?” I asked.

She looked up, then nodded.

We stayed until midnight, when the band had thinned to piano and bass and the caterers were clearing the outer tables. Eventually, we sat at the edge of the floor with our shoes off.

She told me about building her company: long days, dismissive investors, and a call from her first major client saying the system had survived its busiest hours. She had received that call in a parking garage and sat there afterward with no one to tell.

There had been someone early on, she said. As the business grew, the hours and decisions took more of her life. He felt she was disappearing; she felt she was building something.

“We were both right,” she said.

I told her about the year after Clare died. Mrs. Okonquo had brought jollof rice and sat at my kitchen table while I explained how well I was managing.

“You’re building a very strong wall around a very sad man,” she had told me. “One day, even you won’t get out.”

Victoria looked toward the place where I had stood earlier.

“But you came tonight.”

I told her about nearly missing Lily’s father-daughter dance because I was tired and had a delivery due. The disappointment on her face had stayed with me. I danced with her in our living room afterward, but I had also promised myself to start being present when it mattered.

Victoria admitted she rarely spoke this honestly to anyone. People usually wanted something they could use, and she had grown careful about what she let them see.

Then the piano player began a song Clare and I had chosen for our own wedding. I froze.

Victoria noticed. She stayed beside me without asking me to hurry past whatever had happened.

“I know this song,” I finally said.

“Is it okay?”

The memory hurt. It also held Clare laughing because we had chosen something impossible to dance to. I wanted to keep that part of it, too.

I stood and held out my hand. This time, I asked Victoria.

The next morning, Lily watched me turn my coffee mug while her cereal softened.

“Daddy. Something happened.”

I almost said I was fine. Instead, I told her I had met someone.

She put down her spoon.

“Tell me about her.”

I said Victoria worked in technology and meant what she said. Lily asked whether I liked her, refusing to accept “we talked for four hours” as an answer.

“I think I might.”

“Okay.”

“That’s it?”

She shrugged, then looked directly at me.

“You should be happy, Daddy. You’re supposed to be happy.”

I reached across the table for her hand. She squeezed mine and went back to breakfast.

In the workshop, I picked up tools and set them down without accomplishing much. The converted garage smelled of sawdust and linseed oil, familiar things that usually settled my mind. That morning, I kept remembering Victoria’s laugh.

Then she texted. She had gotten my number from Marcus and wanted to say the evening had felt real to her.

“It was real for me, too,” I replied.

She was going to London for a conference and asked about coffee when she returned Friday. I said yes.

That week, I started a walnut credenza without a commission or a client waiting for it. The wood had been on my shelf for two years. For the first time in a long while, I wanted to find out what I could make of it.

Marcus called and told me he had seen a change at the wedding. He also told me Victoria had worked relentlessly to build her business and had been alone for years.

By then, I understood what her name meant outside our conversation. Her fortune was valued at thirty-two billion dollars. Marcus was more interested in the fact that I had talked to her about Clare.

“Don’t talk yourself out of this,” he said.

On Friday, Lily found me debating shirts in front of the bathroom mirror.

“The blue one.”

Mrs. Okonquo took one look at me when I dropped Lily off and refused to accept “just coffee” as an explanation for my face.

“Be honest from the beginning,” she said.

Victoria arrived at the little Wicker Park café in jeans, a jacket, and her hair down. She admitted she had nearly canceled three times, afraid the connection would disappear in daylight.

I told her she had apparently caused a walnut credenza. She laughed so hard she had to set down her cup.

Then she asked about Lily and listened while I described an eight-year-old who alternated between wanting to be a marine biologist and a judge. Lily had recently petitioned her principal for apple slices in the school vending machine and recruited parents to support her case.

“Did she get them?”

“They’re adding options next month.”

Victoria looked delighted.

She told me her parents had immigrated from Trinidad. Her father was an electrician, her mother cleaned houses, and a math competition she won at twelve had opened possibilities she hadn’t known to imagine.

I told her my father had been a carpenter. He died when I was nineteen, leaving tools and the knowledge of how to use them.

Her first company had failed when she was twenty-four. She hated how accounts of her success still returned to it, as though she had built the current company in spite of that experience.

“What you did afterward is the important part,” I said. “You failed and kept building.”

She went quiet, then said people rarely described the failure as something that had helped make her capable.

We stayed through refills and the changing light. Eventually, I asked about Preston at the wedding.

For two years, she said, he had treated her choices as matters requiring his approval. His influence ran through investors and board relationships. She was working to make his capital less essential, but that took time.

“You don’t have to handle everything alone just because you’re used to it,” I told her.

She looked down for a moment before answering.

“You aren’t what I expected.”

“Neither are you.”

Outside, she lingered on the cold sidewalk before going to her car. A text arrived a minute later.

“For the record, the coffee is real. I’m still thinking about it.”

When I collected Lily, I held her without the usual part of my attention already reaching for the next responsibility. She asked for pancakes for dinner. I burned the edges, and she ate them anyway.

The call came the following Tuesday at 6:04 in the morning.

A man introduced himself as Preston’s attorney. His client was concerned that my association with Victoria might affect her company’s credibility. He wanted to discuss arrangements.

I set down my coffee.

“What arrangements?”

He mentioned my daughter and the modest scale of my business, then offered access to clients who could change that scale. Preston, he said, could be generous.

I made him hear the proposal plainly: his client was offering money or business in exchange for my staying away from Victoria.

“The intent is goodwill,” he said.

“I build furniture people use for the rest of their lives,” I told him. “I have standards for what I put my name on. This doesn’t meet them.”

I ended the call.

For several minutes, I stood still. He knew about Lily and my business. Someone had decided those were the right things to mention while offering me a reason to disappear.

I texted Victoria and asked her to call when she was awake. After school drop-off, I sat in the parking lot and told her exactly what had happened.

She was angry and apologized that he had contacted me. She said she would deal with her general counsel and the person who had supplied my number.

“He’ll try another angle,” she warned. “He has board relationships and press contacts. This won’t be one call.”

I told her she should handle the business consequences as she thought best. But Preston’s offer hadn’t changed what I wanted.

“I’m not a pressure point unless I agree to be.”

She was quiet for a while. Then she told me that whatever he did, it didn’t change whether spending time with me was worth it to her.

On Wednesday, Tech Pulse published a profile of Victoria. Among the business questions was a line suggesting that her personal associations had some institutional stakeholders worried about her focus.

It didn’t name me. It didn’t have to.

Victoria’s counsel saw little they could challenge in that careful wording. She was already speaking to board members and reviewing the response when I called Marcus.

He said Preston had influence with several members, but the company was performing well. Then he warned me against trying to protect Victoria by leaving.

“You build beautiful things for other people and stand outside them,” he said. “Don’t do that here. She said she can handle her side. Let her.”

When I asked whether he had arranged our meeting, he said his wife had noticed how often Victoria was alone and asked whether he knew good people. He had mentioned me. What happened on the dance floor had been our decision.

That night, Victoria explained the business conversations, then asked about my day. I told her about the credenza, a difficult joint, and the walnut grain changing direction where I hadn’t expected it.

She listened for fifteen minutes.

“Nobody talks to me about their work without a pitch in it,” she said afterward. “You’re just telling me about wood.”

Before we hung up, she invited me to a foundation event. Pediatric health, a new surgical wing, black tie. There would be investors and press, and she began listing reasons I might prefer to decline.

“I’m saying yes,” I told her.

She offered help finding a suit, then caught herself, worried she had made it sound as though I needed changing.

I told her I appreciated help finding something well made. I would choose it and pay for it.

“I want you there because the evening would be better if you were,” she said.

Lily listened while I explained the event and the cameras that might be there. When I admitted I was nervous about people deciding I didn’t belong, she reminded me of something I had said about a customer who disliked my simple chairs.

“You said that didn’t make the chair wrong. The chair is still a good chair.”

I looked at her across the breakfast table.

“When did you get this smart?”

“I’ve always been this smart. You’re listening better.”

In the workshop, I studied the place where the walnut grain curved away from my sketch. Instead of trying to disguise it, I worked with it. The piece began looking better than the design I had started with.

A Tribune reporter texted asking about Victoria. I declined. A second message said a source had described the attorney’s call and that people were watching me more closely than I realized.

I called Victoria. I wanted her to know, and I needed to participate in whatever we decided to do next.

We talked about answering plainly: her personal life belonged to her, the company was doing well, and anyone interested in its leadership could ask about its performance. We would attend the event as planned.

“You don’t make something sound by hiding its structure,” I said. “You build it honestly.”

She considered that, then agreed.

Marcus’s wife recommended a tailor named Oscar. He measured my shoulders and hands, found a blue suit, and altered it until I could look in the mirror and recognize myself.

Lily appeared behind me while Mrs. Okonquo settled in for the evening.

“Tell Victoria I said hi. And don’t be weird.”

“Define weird.”

“You’ll know.”

Victoria waited for me in the hotel lobby. She straightened a lapel that didn’t need straightening, then started briefing me on the guests, the press, and which people knew Preston.

I told her I recognized what she was doing when she was nervous.

“I’m worried about what they’ll say to you,” she admitted.

I offered my arm.

“The chair is still a good chair.”

She gave me a puzzled look, but took it.

People noticed us. Some looked at my hands and suit, then at Victoria, making calculations I couldn’t prevent and had no obligation to help them complete.

She introduced me by name and profession. A woman recognized the wedding arch through her daughter’s account of the reception. Later, a man asked whether I could restore his grandfather’s dining table.

We talked about its condition until he asked for my number.

“You found a client,” Victoria said quietly.

“He needs help with his grandfather’s table.”

She laughed in the middle of the room, and for a moment I forgot who might be watching.

When a reporter approached, Victoria answered directly. She knew her company’s figures and spoke about her private life without apology. I stood beside her and let her speak for herself.

Then Preston arrived.

He referred to his attorney’s offer as a courtesy. I told him I had understood it perfectly. When he mentioned his interest in the company’s direction, I suggested the quarterly results deserved his attention.

Victoria asked for a moment alone with him. I trusted her, went to the bar, and ordered water.

She joined me a few minutes later. She had told him that further attempts to contact me through intermediaries would be brought before the full investment committee. She had also made clear that touching her again would bring a response from her legal team.

He had smiled and mentioned the next board meeting.

“Another angle,” she said. “But he knows I’m not treating you as something to hide.”

I explained Lily’s good-chair remark. Victoria listened, smiling.

“I’d like to meet her,” she said carefully.

Three weeks later, on a Saturday morning in December, I finished the credenza. The unexpected grain had become its best feature.

Victoria replied to the photograph within minutes. Then she asked whether she could see it in person.

I told her Lily would be home. She understood what I meant, and we agreed on lunch.

Lily reached the door before I did. She wore a manatee sweatshirt and two braids I had tried to make even.

Victoria stood outside in jeans and a sweater, holding a bakery bag.

“I brought four kinds of croissants. I didn’t know what you liked.”

“Good strategy,” Lily said. “Come in.”

Lunch was easy in a way I hadn’t let myself hope for. Lily described an octopus documentary and asked Victoria what she did, whether she liked it, and whether she had seen a real whale.

Victoria answered each question seriously. She told us about a humpback surfacing beside a research vessel she had helped fund, and admitted she had cried.

“Did the researchers see?” Lily asked.

“Yes.”

“But you funded them, so they couldn’t say anything.”

Victoria looked at her.

“Technically accurate.”

After lunch, Lily took her to the workshop while I cleaned up. Through the window, I could hear my daughter explaining the pieces in progress and Victoria asking real questions.

When they returned, Lily told me she knew everything in the shop because I talked while I worked.

“Sometimes you say you have to let it be what it is. I think that’s about other things, too.”

I set down the dish I was holding.

“You’re listening better,” she reminded me.

Victoria began reaching for her jacket when I announced reading time. Lily stopped her.

“You can stay if you’re quiet. It’s the part of A Wrinkle in Time where things get good.”

She fell asleep near the end of the chapter, the book open on her chest. Victoria sat across from us in Clare’s reading chair, a chair Lily had claimed after her mother died and was now willing to share.

“Tell me about Clare,” Victoria said quietly.

She used the name easily. I found I could answer.

Clare had taught kindergarten and carried children’s drawings home because she couldn’t discard them. We had boxes of them in the basement, her “archive.” She laughed without holding anything back and had very little patience for my attending a room while living entirely in my head.

“She would have liked you,” I said. “She would’ve seen the part of you that you work hardest to pretend doesn’t need seeing.”

Victoria looked down. When she raised her eyes, she asked me not to apologize for saying it.

We talked about the final song at Marcus’s wedding. I told her it had been mine and Clare’s, and how hearing it had first stopped me, then made me want to dance.

“I didn’t want it to belong only to what I’d lost,” I said.

She glanced toward Lily, sleeping peacefully beside me.

Then she told me about the coming Thursday. Preston had formally requested that her “extracurricular associations” be discussed as a governance concern.

He didn’t have support for a no-confidence vote. He wanted a statement on record that could be used later if results weakened or another problem arose.

“I’ll present the quarter. Counsel will be there. I’ll answer him.”

I nodded.

“Okay.”

She seemed surprised I didn’t tell her how to prevent it or what she should have done differently. She had told me because we had promised honesty, and because his actions had no bearing on what she wanted with me.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

A board member had offered to broker a statement both sides could accept. Her counsel favored taking it; Victoria believed Preston would use any concession as the starting point for his next demand.

I asked what she believed was right. She said she had spent two years treating his approval as though it could validate what she had built.

I reminded her how she had walked into the foundation event, introducing herself and me without apologizing for either.

“Do that in the boardroom.”

I asked her to stay for dinner. She said yes.

Lily woke hungry and worked on a map project while the soup finished. Victoria sat on the counter and helped with topography.

“Are you coming back?” Lily asked without looking up.

“I’d like to.”

“Good. I need help with the legend. Daddy doesn’t understand legends.”

“Fair criticism,” I said.

“It’s an observation.”

At dinner, the map occupied part of the table. I kept finding myself looking at the three bowls, the pencils, and Victoria listening to Lily explain what still needed adding. I was in the middle of something I wanted, and I had stayed there.

Later, while Lily took her bath, Victoria dried dishes beside me.

“I’m scared,” she said.

She wasn’t asking me to solve it. She wanted to say it where admitting fear wouldn’t become another weakness someone could use.

I put down the dish towel.

“You’re allowed to be scared and still be right.”

She looked at me for a long moment, then stepped forward and wrapped her arms around me. I held her. Neither of us moved until Lily called that her bath temperature required immediate attention.

Victoria laughed against my shoulder.

Before she left, I told her to call after Thursday’s meeting. I would be in the workshop, with my phone.

“Walk in like you built the room,” I said.

Afterward, Lily asked whether Victoria would be okay. She had noticed the same stillness in Victoria that she recognized when I was worried.

I told her I believed she would.

“You should tell her that.”

“I did.”

On Thursday, Victoria texted before going in. Hours later came one word: “Done.”

I answered her call before the second ring.

She had presented revenue up fourteen percent, retention at ninety-one percent, and two enterprise clients expected to close in January. Then Preston made his formal statement about reputational risk.

Victoria acknowledged the concern and said the appropriate measure of her leadership was the company’s performance. Her private life, like that of the other executives present, was hers to manage.

Then she told Preston directly that her decisions outside work weren’t available for committee review.

The room went quiet. His closest ally moved on to questions about projections. Preston had his concern noted for the record, but the discussion went no further.

“He’ll find another angle,” she told me. “This one is finished.”

She sounded relieved rather than triumphant. There would still be work to do, but she had stood in the room and said what she meant.

I invited her over after her last call. Lily would be asleep by the time she arrived.

At a little after nine, she came carrying Thai food. She sat on the couch with her back against the cushions and her feet pulled up, letting herself look as tired as she was.

“I haven’t sat like this in years,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like I don’t have to hold anything up.”

We ate noodles and talked about the foundation’s surgical wing, the credenza’s new owner, and Lily finding her next cause at school.

Victoria said she kept thinking about the grain I had nearly hidden. She had spent years measuring her life against a plan: successful, self-sufficient, needing nothing, asking for nothing.

“Apparently that woman doesn’t eat takeout on someone’s couch after a hard day.”

“It’s a good couch,” I said.

She smiled and settled more comfortably against it.

I brought in something I had been making since finishing the credenza: a small walnut frame. The joints were visible, carefully fitted rather than concealed.

She turned it over and ran her thumb along one.

“What’s it for?”

“Whatever you want to put in it. I made it for you.”

She held it for a while before setting it carefully on the table.

Then she asked whether I would return to Marcus’s wedding venue with her. There was an anniversary event in three weeks. She wanted to go back to where we had met and choose that place together again.

I took her hand.

“Okay.”

On a Saturday evening in January, we walked into the same hall. I wore the blue suit, approved by Lily before we left her with Mrs. Okonquo.

My phone buzzed in the car with one final instruction: Victoria still owed her help with the map legend. Victoria laughed when I showed her.

The event was quieter than the wedding. Couples stood talking beneath the same chandeliers, and the oak floor still caught the light along the grain I had uncovered.

I stopped at its edge.

I thought about Clare. I could remember the way she danced and laughed without needing to remain unhappy to prove I had loved her. The boxes of her students’ drawings were still in the basement. Her chair still belonged in our home. Lily could say her name, and so could I.

I thought of Lily asleep without that worried crease between her eyebrows. She had been right at the breakfast table: happiness belonged in our home, too.

Beside me stood someone who had listened to those memories and made room for them.

“Still don’t dance?” Victoria asked.

“Only with the right person.”

She held out her hand.

This time, I didn’t look toward the wall. I took it, and we walked to the middle of the floor.

Her timing was still unreliable. My footwork had improved less than Lily would have preferred. We laughed, found enough of the rhythm to keep moving, and stayed there.

“Thank you for not staying against the wall,” she said.

“Thank you for walking across the room.”

She lifted her face toward mine.

“I was terrified that night.”

“You didn’t look it.”

“I thought you’d see through me.”

I thought of the woman alone in a parking garage with good news, of the daughter of an electrician and a house cleaner, of Victoria drying a bowl in my kitchen and trusting me enough to say she was afraid.

“I saw you,” I said. “I’m here.”

She held my gaze while we moved slowly across the reclaimed oak.

“Daniel. I love you.”

For one beat, I stood still. Then I drew her a little closer and kept turning.

“I love you, too.”

Her company would still need her. Preston’s influence had not vanished. We still had schedules, responsibilities, and the work of making room for each other in two very different lives.

But I knew what honest work felt like. I knew the patience it required, and how much stronger something could become when you stopped forcing the material to match the first sketch.

Victoria’s hand rested in mine. Beneath us, the floor held.

THE END.