Chapter 4 – The Offer

Willow laid out the proposal directly, over coffee at the only diner in Marfa that stayed open past six — a formal engineering position at Kane Aerospace, working directly on propulsion systems, with a salary and research resources considerably beyond anything Jack had ever imagined his self-taught expertise might actually earn him.

“I need to be honest with you,” Jack said, working through a wariness built from years of his family’s dismissal of exactly this kind of career possibility. “I have a formal engineering degree, technically, but everything relevant to this offer, I taught myself. Independently. After my deployments. I don’t have the kind of formal aerospace credentials most of your team probably has.”

“I don’t care about the credentials,” Willow said, with a directness Jack found immediately, refreshingly different from his family’s persistent skepticism. “I care about the fact that you solved a problem my entire formally credentialed team couldn’t crack for over a year. That’s the only qualification that actually matters to me.”

Jack considered the offer carefully, weighing the genuine appeal of finally working in the field he’d quietly loved for years against the disruption it would represent to the stable, predictable rhythm the garage had offered him during a difficult post-deployment transition.

“I need some time to think about it,” he said finally. “This is a bigger decision than it probably looks like, from where you’re sitting.”

“Take whatever time you need,” Willow said. “Though I’ll admit, I’m hoping you say yes. Not just for the company. I think you’d genuinely thrive somewhere that actually values what you clearly already know how to do.”