“Tell me about it” was all she said.

He liked that. Tell me about it. No empty platitudes, no absolution that wasn’t hers to give. It gave him the confidence he needed.

“Well, I’ve had it pretty easy all my life. As easy as a Greenwood family can have it, I guess. But I was never going to be a businessman like my parents. I was never that good with people, connections.”

She smiled softly. “Not everyone can be.”

“Yeah, but I respect them for it, you know? They were always the first to pitch in when our neighbors needed help, when someone’s business got hurt. I don’t want to take it for granted, everything I have. I want to help out, too. I went to college to earn my own place, to make something of my own from all the little designs I was always fussing with, but it just didn’t feel like enough.”

“Your radio encryption systems? I wouldn’t call those little.”

He blushed, strangely proud. Like maybe he wasn’t so pitiful for looking at her like she was the sunlight that trickled through the trees, dappling the world with flecks of gold, that little spot of brightness in all the cold shadows.

“Well. It didn’t work out so great.”

Rebeka’s smile faded.

“Last year, I ended up working an internship at Connolly Surveying—an oil company in Tulsa. A bunch of us from the engineering college did. Kind of came as a shock that this white man wanted us to work for him and that he’d actually pay us fairly.

“But he was polite, and encouraging, worked right alongside us to build out mathematical models for picking drilling sites or improving extraction techniques. When he asked me to build a digital computer to help the mathematicians run their projections, I was all too happy to help.”

With the soldering iron running, Phillip almost couldn’t hear the laughter and tinkling glasses from the rest of Connolly Surveying’s offices at the top of the Philtower. His parents had all but ordered him to attend his employer’s Christmas party, much to his dread. It wasn’t that he hated being around people, though that was hardly his favorite thing, either. It was the added layer of tension, like a chewy cake fondant, draped over all his interactions with them, and in a company owned by a white man, the layer may as well have been concrete. He felt like some kind of jack-in-the-box everyone kept cranking, waiting to see what he’d spring up with next.

Not even Darius, his best friend, was soothing his nerves this time. When Mr. Connolly dragged him out for a toast to his newest engineering success, Phillip had found Darius and several of the other mathematicians conspicuously absent. The other interns from the engineering school only glared at him until he lowered his gaze.