It showed the engineering team crowded into the company cafeteria, a sheet cake on the long table, paper cups of cider raised, forty-odd faces grinning at the camera in the fluorescent light.

They had been celebrating the federal contract — the seven-year renewal that had been won, this time, with nothing but honest work laid out where anyone could check it.

Somewhere in the back of the frame I could see the corner of the apprenticeship-program banner we had rehung the previous spring.

Beneath the photograph, Katarina had written only one line.

Thank you for seeing who we really were.

I stood in the falling leaves and read it twice, and I felt my throat tighten in the particular way it does when a thing lands exactly where you did not know you were still tender.