“No,” Richard said quickly. He faced Amelia. “Don’t go. You’ve been filling the gaps I leave. That’s not something you should do alone.”

Silence braided through the room. After a breath, Richard turned to Oliver. “When I was your age,” he said, “I used to hide a paperback under the dinner table. I wanted to be the kid who finished first. But the lines would jump. The letters felt like bugs under a jar. I never told anyone.”

Oliver’s head snapped up. “You?”

“I never had a name for it,” Richard said. “I just worked harder and got very, very good at pretending. It made me efficient.” He huffed a small laugh. “And impatient with anything that slowed the machine.”

Grace’s eyes softened. “It can run differently, you know.”

He looked at her. At his son. At his wife. “It has to.”

That evening they sat together at the kitchen island, calendars open like maps. Richard blocked off Wednesdays at six—Dad and Ollie Club—in permanent ink. “No meetings,” he said, half to his assistant who wasn’t there, half to the part of himself that always found a way to squeeze one more call into an hour. “Non-negotiable.”