And before Daniel could respond, she turned and walked back out into the rain like she’d only come in for one thing: proof the world still had corners of kindness left.
Daniel picked up the card.
Glossy. Heavy. The kind of paper that didn’t belong in a café that handed out napkins like they were rationed.
The name stared up at him.
Vivien Rhodess
CEO, Oralless Technologies
The room tilted.
Daniel’s fingers tightened around the card so hard the edges pressed into his skin.
Oralless.
That company.
The company that had taken away the person he loved most in this world.
Sophie tugged his sleeve again, confused by his stillness.
Dad? What?
Daniel swallowed. His throat felt like it was full of gravel.
He couldn’t answer. Not yet.
He just stared at Vivien Rhodess’s name until the letters blurred.
Because in one minute, in one latte, in a simple moment of sign language at a counter, the past had walked into his present wearing a red coat.
Daniel Brooks was thirty-six years old, and every morning he woke to the sound of silence.
Not the peaceful kind you get after a good day. Not the kind that feels like rest.
The kind that comes when something beautiful has been ripped away and the air still expects you to keep breathing.
Three years ago, Daniel had been a software engineer specializing in artificial intelligence. He wrote code that helped machines predict traffic patterns, analyze streams, understand human behavior. He liked problems that could be solved. He liked systems that made sense.
His wife, Rachel, had been in the industry too. Brilliant. Sharp. The kind of person who could walk into a room full of engineers and make them quiet with one question.
They had shared a small house in the suburbs, the kind with a squeaky front step and a backyard Sophie thought was an entire wilderness.
Sophie had been born deaf. It hadn’t scared Rachel and Daniel the way it scared other people.
They learned.
They adapted.
They signed to their baby the way you sing lullabies. They celebrated every new word Sophie learned in ASL the way other parents celebrated first steps.
Sophie’s laughter filled every room anyway.
Then came the accident.
A self-driving car manufactured by Oralless Technologies malfunctioned on a rainy highway. The software failed to detect stopped traffic ahead. An entire system built to “protect” humans did what humans have always done when they get greedy.
It failed.
Rachel was crossing the street with groceries. She never had a chance.
Daniel filed a lawsuit.
It was dismissed.
Evidence disappeared. Emails vanished. Test logs went missing like they’d grown legs and walked off. Oralless lawyers showed up with polished smiles and endless resources, turning Daniel’s grief into a problem they could outlast.
Daniel became too vocal about corporate accountability. He spoke too loudly for a man without power.
He lost his job.
Then he lost the house when legal fees drained their savings.
All he had left was Sophie and a rage so deep it had nowhere to go but inward.
Now he worked the night shift at Seattle Bruise, a small café downtown where the tips were decent and the questions were few. He lived in a cramped apartment on the edge of the city, the kind of place where the heat barely worked and the walls were thin enough to hear neighbors arguing like it was a soundtrack.
But Sophie’s drawings covered every surface.
Crayon landscapes. Fingerpainted sunsets. A child’s vision of color in a world that had gone gray.
Every evening before his shift, Daniel counted cash in the kitchen drawer. Rent due in twelve days. Sophie’s tuition at the special school for deaf children due in fifteen. He picked up weekend work at a garage, coming home with oil under his fingernails and exhaustion in his bones.
On his wrist, he wore a silver bracelet engraved with five words:
Listen with your heart.
See more on the next page
Advertisement
