Scan

Otis didn't look up. "I can't stop," he said. "If I stop, I'll lose my place. I just have to keep going till it's done, then check at the end."

Scan sat down beside him, in no rush. "That's the most common way," she agreed. "Head down, push to the end, check at the very last. And sometimes it works fine." She nudged a friendly nose toward his work. "But here's the thing about checking only at the end — if something went a little sideways back near the start, you don't find out until you've built the whole rest of it on top of the sideways part. Then the fix isn't small anymore. It's everything."

Otis paused. "But looking back feels like wasting time."

"It feels that way," Scan said warmly. "It really does. A glance feels like a hiccup in the work. But it's the opposite. A ten-second glance now is how you don't spend an hour later." She gave a little lemur-grin. "I'm not asking you to judge what you've done. I'd never. I'm just asking you to look. Looking and judging are different things. Looking is just gathering information."

Otis let out a breath and, for the first time, lifted his head and looked back at the early part of his build.

Scan looked with him, shoulder to shoulder. "There's no wrong way to glance," she murmured. "I just ask myself one quiet question: does this still match where I said I was going? Not 'is it perfect.' Not 'am I good at this.' Just — does the path I'm on still lead where I meant?"

Otis scanned back along his steps. And there — not far from the start — he found it. A small wrong turn. A piece set the wrong way round, three steps in. From there, everything he'd built had leaned, just slightly, off-true.

His stomach dropped. "I messed it up way back there," he said. "I've been building on a mistake this whole time."

"You found it," Scan corrected gently, with real warmth. "That's a completely different thing. You found it now, while it's a three-step fix — instead of at the end, where it would've been a take-the-whole-thing-apart fix. The glance just saved you an hour, Otis. That's not a mess. That's a rescue."

Together they undid the three steps back to the wrong turn, set the piece the right way round, and Otis began rebuilding from the true spot. This time he glanced back every little while — not because Scan told him to, but because he'd felt, in his own chest, the difference between catching a wrong turn small and discovering it huge.

"It's funny," Otis said, working steadier now. "I thought stopping to look would slow me down. But I'm actually faster this way. I'm not scared the whole thing is secretly wrong anymore. I can just... build."

"That's the part nobody tells you," Scan said happily. "The glance doesn't just catch mistakes. It takes away the worry. When you check as you go, you stop carrying that low hum of is-this-all-wrong in the back of your head. You get to trust your own work, because you've been keeping an eye on it the whole time."

Otis noticed it was true. The knot of dread he'd been building with — the fear that he'd reach the end and it would all be ruined — had quietly dissolved. In its place was a calm, light feeling: he and his work were on speaking terms now. He knew where it stood, because he kept looking.