Frayed Button

Logan Brooks lined up the mismatched brown button on his right cuff and tried to push it through the frayed thread hole. His fingers stalled on the stiff wool.

“Hold still,” Sophie said.

She stood on her tiptoes on the pine floorboards, reaching up to cinch the knot of his navy necktie. Her thumb smoothed his collar down.

“It looks crooked,” Logan said, looking past her shoulder into the narrow mirror hanging by the front door.

“It was crooked when Mom tied it six years ago,” Sophie said. She gave the silk a firm downward jerk. “There. Now you look like an accountant who lost his car.”

Logan ran two fingers over the worn fabric of his sleeve. His wife had stitched that replacement button at their laminate kitchen counter four months before the cancer took her breath. He turned the plain gold band on his left ring finger twice, feeling the weight of the house behind him.

For three years after his father died, Logan had stayed away from the thirty-four-story glass tower downtown. Harold Sterling had built an engineering empire on diesel exhaust, cold steel, and brass valves, but he left the trust control to his son under his mother’s maiden name. Logan wanted no corner office, no corporate driver, and no security detail watching his middle-schooler walk to the bus stop.

He glanced down at the scratched paper folder resting on the entryway bench. Doubts pressed against his chest like wet gravel.

“I can still call Daniel,” Logan murmured. “Tell him to cancel the nine o’clock pitch.”

Sophie hopped off her heels and slapped both palms against his ribs. “You spent three full weeks writing that workflow proposal at the dining table. Go show them.”

Logan took a slow breath and squeezed her shoulder.

Ten minutes later, he backed his two-door sedan out of the gravel driveway. The paper folder sat on the passenger seat beside his cold travel mug, heading toward the steel tower he had spent three years avoiding.