On a spring morning nearly two years after the hearing, Eleanor stood in the lobby of a new building bearing the company’s updated name. Not Reeves. Never again Reeves. The rebranding had been debated for months. In the end she chose Vance Systems only as a temporary legal bridge, then replaced even that with something cleaner, something not tied to any man or family mythology. Structures should not be monuments to egos, she said. They should outlast them.
Employees filled the atrium below, moving toward coffee stations and conference rooms. Screens on the wall displayed launch metrics from a new platform division she had overseen from concept to release. The twins, older now and louder, had insisted on coming in before school because one of them wanted to see “where the machines live” and the other wanted proof that his mother’s office contained fewer robots than she had once implied.
As they waited for the elevator, Adrian looked up at the building around them and asked, “Do people know you built it?”
Eleanor smiled. “Some do.”
“Do they know Dad didn’t?”
She crouched to zip his half-open jacket. “That’s not the important part.”
He thought about that. “What is?”