Marco stared at the screen. A grid of ghostly blue lines. A palette of digital cubes. It felt like cheating.

Marco set down the tablet. He didn’t need to see the model anymore.

“Go digital,” his daughter Lena said, sliding a tablet across his breakfast plate. “There’s this free software. SketchUp. You can build anything in there before you touch a single plank.”

Lena overheard. She dragged a block of scrap pine onto his workbench. “Then make it real.”

Marco smiled. “It started free,” he said. “Then I had to earn it.”

By sunset, he’d built a phantom chair that had never existed outside his daydreams. He rotated it, squinted at the joints, adjusted an angle by two degrees. No waste. No cracked dovetails. No blood from a slipped chisel.