Chapter 5 – What Jack Decided

Jack spent two weeks working through the decision, discussing it carefully with his uncle, who, unlike the rest of his family, had always quietly supported whatever pace Jack needed to rebuild his life after deployment, garage work included.

“You’ve been doing that engineering stuff in the back workshop for two years now,” his uncle observed, during one of their evening conversations. “Never once complained about it feeling like a waste. Maybe it’s time to let it be the actual thing, instead of just the thing you do after the real job’s done.”

Jack accepted Willow’s offer three weeks after their initial meeting, negotiating a start date that gave him time to properly transition his responsibilities at the garage and prepare, mentally, for a career shift his family had spent years insisting he should have made immediately upon returning from deployment.

Telling his family proved considerably more complicated than accepting the job itself, his mother’s reaction landing somewhere between vindicated relief and genuine confusion about the years of “wasted” garage work she’d never understood as anything but a step backward.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t just tell us you were working on this,” she said, once Jack explained the full scope of his independent research and the recruitment that had followed. “We could have supported you properly, instead of criticizing something we didn’t understand.”

“I didn’t think you’d understand it as anything other than another disappointment,” Jack admitted honestly. “The garage work felt like exactly the kind of thing you’d already decided was a waste. I wasn’t ready to add the engineering work to that same conversation, not until it actually became something real.”