Brandon let out a breath. He had expected to feel relieved by the money, and he did. But what rose in him instead, strange and bright, was something close to gratitude for the hardness of the offer. Nobody was making it easy. Nobody was telling him he was fine.

"I'll do it," he said.

"You don't need to decide now."

"I've decided." He set down the mug and straightened in his chair. "Mr. Hayes, I don't know why you're doing this."

Walter was quiet for a moment.

"When I was twenty-two," he said, "I made a mistake on a stress calculation. A small one. A decimal, in the wrong place. An older engineer named Harold Voss caught it before it reached a prototype. He could have gone to the director. Instead he sat me down at his workbench and spent six hours showing me how the thing actually worked. Not the numbers. The thing." He lifted his hands, palm up, in a gesture oddly like a blessing. "I've spent fifty years paying that debt forward. Sometimes it's an engineer. Sometimes it's a student. This time it's a salesman. It doesn't matter. A person who gets a second chance, if he's lucky, becomes a person who gives one."

Eddie grumbled something that sounded like softhearted old fool. But when Brandon looked at him, the big man had turned toward the window, and his eyes were suspiciously bright.

"I'll call Marcus," Walter said. "You start Monday. Wear boots. Gus doesn't tolerate loafers."

Brandon nodded. He rose, awkwardly, and extended his hand. Walter looked at it for a moment, then took it in both of his, a dry, warm, papery grip that held on a second longer than a handshake required.

"One more thing," Walter said.

"Yes?"

"You said you wanted to ask what you could do." Walter's eyes crinkled. "Lucy mentioned it to Marcus, who mentioned it to me. She's a perceptive girl. Here's your answer. Come to the gala. Not as a salesman. As a member of the crew. There's something I want to show a room full of people, and I'd like you to be standing close when I do."

"I don't understand."

"You will."

He walked Brandon to the front door. On the porch, in the amber light, Brandon turned back, and found the old man's gaze resting on him with an expression he could not read, a look composed of curiosity, and hope, and a very faint, almost private sorrow.

"Good evening, Mr. Pryce," said Walter Hayes.

Gus

The service department of Lakeshore Aurelia occupied the back third of the building, behind a pair of steel doors that Brandon had passed through perhaps six times in four years. At seven o'clock on Monday morning, in new work boots that already rubbed his heels, he pushed them open and walked into a world he had never really seen.

It was loud. That was the first surprise. Pneumatic wrenches shrieked, a radio blared classic rock, and somewhere a compressor was breathing like an enormous animal. The air smelled of rubber, coolant, and hot metal. Eight lifts stood in a long row under flickering fluorescent tubes, and on each one a car hung in the air like a patient on an operating table.

"You're late," said a voice.

Brandon checked his watch. It was 6:58. "I'm two minutes early."

"On this floor, early is on time. On time is late." A man stepped out from behind a lift, wiping his hands on a rag. He was sixty-three, short and wide-shouldered, with a drooping white mustache and forearms like cured hams. His coveralls bore a stitched name tag that read GUS. His eyes were small, sharp, and utterly unimpressed. "You're the salesman."

"I was."

"You are the salesman. You'll stop being it when I say so." Gus looked him up and down. "Mr. Doyle says you're here to learn. I say you're here to mop. Let's find out which of us is right."

He thrust a stiff bristle broom into Brandon's hands.

For the first three hours, Brandon swept. He swept the length of the shop, around the lifts, under the benches, in the corners where grease had hardened into black glass. Then he mopped. Then he hauled a drum of used oil to a recycling tank, nearly dropping it on his foot, and was informed in several colorful syllables what he had done wrong. At ten o'clock he was handed a wire brush and a bucket and shown how to scrub the caked wheel wells of a pickup truck. By noon, his hands were raw and his shirt was soaked.

Nobody spoke to him. Nobody looked at him, exactly. But he felt them watching, the six or seven technicians in their stained coveralls, with the quiet, amused patience of men who had seen a dozen cocky young hires break in the first week.