“I’m Rowan Hale,” the man said, extending a hand roughened by actual work rather than handshakes in conference rooms. “And this is my son, Milo.”
“Eliza,” she replied. She did not add her last name.
Milo grinned as if this were an entirely normal arrangement. “Dad says you shouldn’t eat alone on New Year’s Eve,” he said earnestly. “It messes up the wish.”
Eliza felt her throat tighten unexpectedly. “Does it?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Wishes work better when someone else hears them.”
Dinner began awkwardly but warmed quickly. Rowan, she learned, owned a small auto repair garage on the South Side, the kind of place that survived on word of mouth and long hours, and he spoke about engines the way poets speak about language, describing how every machine had a rhythm and how you could tell when something was wrong if you listened long enough. He wasn’t embarrassed by the grease under his nails or the fact that his jacket bore the name of his shop stitched in fading thread; he wore his life plainly.
Eliza found herself talking about factory floors and policy battles in Washington, but stripped of the jargon she usually deployed, her stories sounded less like triumph and more like exhaustion. She admitted, almost against her will, that she could not remember the last time she had sat at a table without someone needing something from her.
Rowan listened without interruption, nodding occasionally, not impressed, not intimidated, just present. “Sounds like you built something big,” he said eventually, “but forgot to leave room inside it for yourself.”
The sentence lingered.
As the evening unfolded, Milo showed her a small notebook from his backpack filled with sketches of cars that could fly and bridges powered by wind turbines shaped like dragon wings. Eliza examined each page with genuine interest, asking questions about design and fuel systems, and Milo’s eyes widened as though no adult had ever taken his drawings so seriously.
