"I'm still finding them." Mason picked up the pen from the folder's inner pocket and signed the contract on the signature line with the same signature that appeared in the lower corner of the original GT7 drawings. The same two initials, the same angle, the same quiet certainty of a person who has known who they are for a long time and has simply been waiting for a moment when it was safe to say so.
He set the pen down. "One condition, not in the contract." She waited.
"Xavier runs a full technical briefing before his next race. Not the maintenance protocol, the original design logic."
"He deserves to know what he's driving." "Done," she said without hesitation.
Luna emerged from her room at exactly the wrong moment and exactly the right moment, as she usually did, wearing one sock and holding Cog by both ears and asking whether the guest was staying for lunch. Evelyn said she couldn't.
"Thank you." Luna appraised her with the frank assessment of a 6-year-old and said, "You have nice shoes," and went back to her room. Mason was almost smiling.
Evelyn stood. At the door she paused because there was one thing left that she needed to say, and it was the kind of thing that did not have a clean, professional form.
"I'm sorry," she said, "for not asking the right questions when I should have." Mason considered this with the same seriousness he gave everything. "You asked the right questions eventually," he said.
"That counts." He came home that evening at 5:30, the first time in weeks that he had been there before the light went out of the sky. Luna heard the key in the lock and came running from the kitchen with flour on her hands because the neighbor had been teaching her to make biscuits, and she grabbed his arm and pulled him in to see the biscuits, which were uneven and slightly too brown on one side, and which she described as perfect.
He sat at the kitchen table and ate a biscuit and did not think about pressure valves or board presentations or what the next 6 months would require of him. He thought about whether they needed more orange juice and whether Luna's lucky socks had been washed and whether the toy car on the kitchen floor still needed its rear axle alignment corrected, which it did.
After dinner, after Luna's bath, after the reading and the goodnight and the particular stillness that settled over the apartment when she finally slept, Mason sat alone at the kitchen table with the folder from the day's meeting open beside him and a blank sheet of paper in front of him. He did not draw anything technical.
He sat with the quiet, the way he had learned to sit with it, not fighting it, not filling it, just occupying it. In his jacket pocket was an envelope that Dominic had handed him at the coffee shop 2 days before, the one a dead man had written with the intention of giving it in person and had never gotten the chance.
Mason had read it twice and then folded it along its original creases and placed it carefully in his inside pocket next to nothing else. The card tucked inside it was old company stock bearing the title Chief Design Engineer above his name.
He had neither thrown it away nor displayed it. He had placed it at the back of the kitchen drawer under the flashlight batteries and the spare key, where things were kept not because they were decorative, but because they were real.