They drank their tea and looked at the garden and a bird landed on the wall at the far end and left and the morning did what mornings did.
"How old are you this year," he said finally.
"Twenty four."
"When I was twenty four I was in my second year of building what became Blackwood Enterprises." He looked at the garden. "I had forty pounds in a bank account and a business plan that three different investors had told me was too ambitious and a particular quality of stubbornness that my own grandfather described as the most exhausting thing he'd ever encountered in a person."
Aria looked at him.
"He wasn't wrong," Richard said. "I was exhausting. I was also right." He paused. "About the business plan."
She waited.
