Daniel continued.
“Natalie could be funny.”
“So?”
“Kind sometimes.”
“To who?”
“To me.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“It does.”
Lily looked annoyed.
Daniel understood.
Children wanted villains to look like villains before the damage.
Adults often wanted that too.
“Natalie helped me after your mom died.”
Lily went quiet.
“How?”
“I was lonely.”
“Grandpa was here.”
“That kind of loneliness is different.”
Lily looked toward the yard.
“Did she pretend?”
“Some things.”
“All?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t.”
Daniel leaned back.
“People can care about someone and still choose themselves in terrible ways.”
Lily hated the answer.
“Then how do you trust anyone?”
Daniel thought for a long time.
“Not the way I used to.”
“What does that mean?”
“I used to think trust meant not checking.”
Lily listened.
“Now?”
“Trust means I can ask questions without the relationship falling apart.”
She considered.
“Grandpa checks everything.”
“Yes.”
“Because he trusts nobody.”
“No.”
Daniel smiled.
“Because Grandpa is seventy-seven and enjoys making everyone uncomfortable.”
Richard shouted from inside.
“I heard that.”
Lily laughed.
Daniel smiled.
It was good to hear.
Richard lived another nine years.
Long enough to see Lily graduate high school.
Long enough to teach her how to read a balance sheet.
Long enough for her to tell him repeatedly that she had no interest in running Hayes Engineering.
“You own part of it.”
“That doesn’t mean I want meetings.”
“Meetings are where empires are built.”
“Meetings are where happiness dies.”
Richard blamed Daniel.
Daniel blamed the internet.
Lily studied environmental design instead.
Richard complained for three months.
Then funded a university research center related to sustainable manufacturing because apparently disappointment had limits when grandchildren were involved.
He died when Lily was seventeen.
Peacefully.
At home.
The crystal mosaic hung in his study behind the desk.
In his will, he left it to Lily.
Not the surviving horse head.
That went to Daniel.
The tree belonged to her.
When the lawyer read that clause, Lily cried harder than when she heard the value of the trust.
Daniel understood.
Money described scale.
Objects described people.
Lily hung the mosaic in her college apartment despite Daniel insisting it belonged somewhere safer.
“It’s worth a lot.”
“It’s broken glass.”
“It is commissioned artwork.”
“It’s mine.”
Daniel smiled.
She sounded like Richard.
“Fine.”
During her sophomore year, a roommate accidentally cracked one small piece while moving furniture.
The roommate cried.
Lily stared at the damage.
Then laughed.
“It’s okay.”
The roommate looked horrified.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Actually, this thing has survived worse.”
She repaired it with help from an art student.
The new piece did not perfectly match.
Lily left it visible.
Richard would have approved.
Daniel remarried only once more.
Much later.
Lily was twenty-two.
The woman’s name was Grace Chen.
A pediatric cardiologist who met Daniel at a charity dinner and told him within fifteen minutes that his opinion about hospital construction was wrong.
He liked her immediately.
Lily did not.
At first.
Daniel did something differently this time.