Franklin nodded. "Armor that works is still a tax."
"Yeah."
On the drive home from the lab, Franklin called his older sister, Ruth, who lived three states away and had a talent for turning worry into bullet points. He told her the short version. Ruth inhaled sharply at Liam's line, then said, "Do you want me to fly in and stare at that boy until he invents a time machine?"
"No."
"Do you want me to email the CEO a poem?"
"Absolutely not."
"Fine. Then I'm sending Denise a gift card for the kind of dinner you forget to schedule when you're busy being principled."
Franklin laughed, tired and real. "She'll like that more than a poem."
"Everyone likes that more than a poem," Ruth said. "Except poets. And even poets like dinner."
After he hung up, he sat in his driveway for a full minute with the engine off, listening to the tick of cooling metal. The house windows were warm rectangles. Denise's silhouette moved past the kitchen glass. He thought of Liam's crossed arms again and felt not rage exactly but a familiar sediment — the accumulated weight of a hundred smaller sortings that never made it into incident PDFs. Sediment did not explode. Sediment settled until one day a hinge clicked and you realized how much of the riverbed was you.
He went inside and washed his hands longer than soap required.
He drove home through light traffic, listening to a station Denise liked that played old soul and newer things that borrowed from it without always saying thank you. At a red light, he caught his own eyes in the rearview: tired, steady, not triumphant. The mic-drop line from the morning — Apparently, it's professional enough — had already begun to feel like a quote other people would want him to live inside forever. He refused. He was not a punchline with a beard. He was a man who still had to decide, over weeks, whether a training draft was real.
Denise met him at the door with a glass of water and a look that inventoried him.
"Tell me," she said.
He told her in the kitchen while she chopped peppers for a late lunch that was also an early dinner. He told her about Liam's crossed arms, Adrian's arrival, the upstairs room, the photo request, the held-open complaint, the singing speaker, the VP who wanted optics. Denise listened the way she always had — like a person who understood that love was partly the willingness to carry details that did not belong to you.
When he finished, she set the knife down. "You hungry for food or for quiet?"
"Both."