Those offers would have made him wealthy many times over and given him a name recognized throughout the entire industry. And he had turned down every single one of them without hesitation, choosing instead to remain close to the work itself rather than chase any title attached to it.
He wanted, more than anything else in the world, a life that felt entirely his own. He wanted one built around long, quiet hours in a workshop rather than long, hollow hours in boardrooms filled with people who cared more about quarterly numbers than the machines those numbers were supposedly meant to represent.
Everything changed the year his wife passed away. The loss arrived without warning and without any trace of mercy, leaving Silas to walk through an empty house that had once been filled with her laughter, her presence lingering in every room he could no longer bear to enter without feeling the absence all over again.
He did not speak of it often, and those who worked near him during that period learned quickly, through his silence more than his words, never to ask him about it directly.
In the difficult months that followed, he closed the door on the brilliant career that had once defined him entirely, turned away every recruiter who came calling with increasingly generous offers, and opened a small, unmarked garage where he could work in peace, take only the jobs that mattered to him personally, and let the wider world forget his name if it wanted to.
Without complaint or resentment on his part, Arthur Ashcroft had reached out to him more than once during those quiet years.
He hoped against hope to convince him to return to the company that owed him so much. He offered him titles, equity, and entire departments built specifically around his expertise and reputation. Each time, Silas had thanked him politely and declined just as firmly as before, telling him only that some chapters of a person's life were simply meant to stay closed forever, no matter how tempting the offer to reopen them might be.
There had been one particular evening, many years earlier, when Arthur had driven out to that same lake house alone, and sat across from Silas at a small kitchen table, trying one last time to convince him that the company still needed his mind, that no engineer hired since had ever matched the instinct he once brought to a stalled engine or a collapsing timeline.
Silas had listened patiently that night, the way he listened to everything, and had told Arthur simply that some men were built to lead departments, and some men were built to fix what was broken with their own two hands, and that he had made his peace long ago with which kind of man he actually was.
Arthur had never forgotten that quiet conversation, had carried it with him through every merger and every product launch in the years that followed, and had quietly instructed his staff, without ever once telling his daughter, to keep a discreet and respectful eye on that small, unmarked garage from a comfortable distance, never interfering, simply making certain that the man who had once saved his company was never in need of anything he could not privately provide.
It was for precisely this reason, more than any other, that the news of Vivian's behavior struck him with such force that evening. He had spent decades quietly protecting the dignity of a man who wanted nothing from him in return. And in a single careless afternoon, his own daughter had undone that fragile respect without even understanding what she had touched or why it mattered so much.
As the helicopter cut through the darkening evening sky toward the city, Arthur sat with his jaw set tight and his hands folded rigidly in his lap, replaying the conversation from earlier that day over and over in his mind.
He said quietly, almost entirely to himself, that his own daughter had just insulted the very man who had once saved the company that now proudly bore her last name across every letterhead, every product line, and every piece of marketing material the firm had ever produced. It was not simply an unpaid invoice that troubled him so deeply.
It was the unbearable realization that the values he had spent 40 years carefully building into that company, respect for skill, respect for honest labor, respect for the people who built things with their own two hands, had apparently failed to pass down from his own generation into hers, no matter how much money or education she had been given along the way.