"Mijo," Michel told David one evening, watching the sun set from their small office. The Texas heat was finally breaking, orange light painting the strip mall parking lot gold. David's homework lay abandoned, his attention caught by something in his father's voice—that tone that meant a conversation worth remembering. "Let me tell you something about falling."
David looked up from his homework, knowing this tone meant something important was coming. He closed his laptop, giving his father the respect of full attention the way Michel had taught him.
"When everything crashes down, when the world takes away what you thought mattered—your job, your pride, your plans—that's when you learn the truth. You are not your title. You are not your salary. You are not what others think of you."
Michel's hands—scarred now from cleaning chemicals and coding marathons both—rested on the desk Sophie had painted with励 characters. Through the window, Brennan Industries stood like a monument to his former life, its windows beginning to glow with night shift work.
"You know what I was, mijo? Before?" David nodded, though they rarely spoke of it directly. "Director of Operations. Corner office. People who jumped when I called. And you know what? None of that was me. That was just a costume I wore, a role I played. When they took it away, I thought I was nothing."
He pulled David close, the boy almost too big now for these embraces but never refusing them. "You are the choices you make when choices are all you have left. You are the love that keeps you standing. You are the work you do with dignity, no matter what that work is. And you—" he ruffled his son's hair, a gesture carried from David's toddler days, "—you are the reason I learned that $47.83 in quarters can be worth more than any paycheck I ever earned."
David was quiet for a long moment, processing. This kid who'd counted coins on the carpet, who'd broken his piggy bank with his father's hammer, who'd watched his family rebuild from nothing. "Is that why you keep Mom's photo from that night? Not the beach one?"
Michel smiled. His son saw everything, just like Maria. "Because that night, sitting at our kitchen table with your quarters and Sophie's bicycle money, I wasn't a former executive or a future janitor. I was your father. And that—that's the only title that ever really mattered."
Outside, the city hummed with a million stories of struggle and triumph. But inside the small office of Martinez Systems Solutions, a father and son sat in comfortable silence, understanding that sometimes the greatest journeys aren't about climbing back to where you were.
They're about discovering where you were always meant to be.
In the desk drawer, wrapped in tissue, sat $47.83 in quarters. Uncashed. Priceless. A reminder that wealth comes in many currencies, and the most valuable ones can't be deposited in any bank.
"Come on," Michel said finally. "Your mom's making tamales. And Sophie's probably already designed new labels we'll need to approve."
They left together, turning off lights, locking doors. Just a father and son heading home, carrying with them the knowledge that falling is just another word for learning to fly.