Chapter 6
Shane is halfway through breaking down a shipment when I push through the pop-up door, and he reads my face before I've cleared the threshold.
"Bad morning or bad headline?" he asks, without looking up from the box cutter in his hand.
"Trick question," I say, and hold out my phone.
He takes it, scans the Ventura County Star column, goes back to the top and reads it again more slowly.
He reads two lines out loud, low and steady. "Cleared a fire-code citation with unusual speed." He scrolls a fraction and reads the next one. "Questions have been raised about how quickly the issue was resolved."
His mouth pulls in at one corner and I watch him decide how to hold his reaction, which tells me he already knows what he's reading before he's finished reading it.
"We both know that's not true. Remediation hasn't even started," he says, handing the phone back.
"You know who she is, right?"
"Yeah, she owns a bookstore in Camarillo." He goes back to the box in front of him and pulls the tape in one clean draw. "She's been circling Harbor View Drive for months. You're not the first person she's aimed something like this at."
I set my coffee on the nearest table and look at the post and comments again, which I've now read multiple times and will probably read again without learning anything new.
The thing is it doesn't need to be true to be damaging.
It only needs to circulate, and in a town this size, it'll make the full loop before I've finished my second cup of coffee.
"She's likely the one who pointed the Star reporter in my direction, about my pen name.
Callum traced her forum post last night and found a connection. "
Shane goes still with the box cutter flat in his hand. Then he sets a row of hardcovers on a display table and squares them against the edge with his thumb. "That's a hell of a lot of effort for someone trying to take out a competitor."
"That's what I think." I pick up my coffee, take a sip, and discover it's already cold, which is really just the morning being on-brand. "She didn't stumble into any of this. Someone had to have handed her the angle and she ran with it."
"It'll pass," Shane says, with the kind of easy certainty that belongs to someone who's never had their name in a column like this one. "Stuff like this always does, once there's nothing new to feed it."
I look out through the front glass, where the morning is conducting itself with total indifference to my situation.
A delivery truck is stopped along Harbor View while the driver wrestles a stack of boxes toward the bakery next door.
A woman is losing an argument with a dog over a specific patch of sidewalk.
Somewhere down the block, someone is having a perfectly acceptable day.
Shane's right, so I leave it there.
I almost text Jonah.
Then I remember he's somewhere north of Malibu chasing a brush fire through dry hillsides and probably hasn't looked at his phone since sunrise.
I lock the screen and slide it back into my pocket.
The delivery driver enters the store and I leave Shane with the morning delivery.
Before I can make it to the door, Mrs. Monahan appears from somewhere inside the fiction section carrying three paperbacks.
"Any news on the original bookstore?"
I smile despite myself. "Working on it."
"Good." She tucks a book under her arm. "This place is lovely, but it's not home."
Then she pats my shoulder on her way to the register like she's personally approved the remediation timeline.
I walk the two blocks back to the original location to meet with the remediations contractor.
The whole way, I'm composing a response in my head, something measured and professional that I can post to the store's socials that doesn't make me sound defensive, which is difficult because I am defensive, and also furious, and also running on approximately four hours of sleep.
The response I've drafted by the time I reach the door is excellent, though I'll never send it.
Instead, I walk in to find Callum already at the service counter with the remediation plan spread in front of him, sleeves rolled to the elbow, studying the page like showing up unannounced to take over my contractor meeting is the most reasonable thing in the world.
I feel the irritation as soon as I see him, and then I notice his hands on the paper, the same hands from yesterday, and I push the thought aside.
"Where's the contractor?" I ask.
"I sent him revisions," he says, still looking at the plan. "He misread the fire egress requirement. His timeline would have pushed re-inspection four days past your pop-up window. It won't now."
I stare at him for a second because the words take a beat to fully land.
"You sent revisions," I repeat. "On my building. Without talking to me first."
Now he looks up. "On the code requirements."
"No, don't do that," I say, already angry enough that I can hear the sharpness in my own voice. "Don't make this sound smaller than it is. You walked into my contractor meeting and started making decisions like this place belongs to you."
His expression stays infuriatingly level. "Your re-inspection window was wrong."
"Then you call me," I snap. "You don't rewrite my timeline behind my back because you decided you knew better."
"I did know better," he says.
That lands exactly as badly as it should.
I set my bag down hard enough that the pens in the cup rattle. "You are not the contractor, Callum. You're not my business partner and you're definitely not the person who gets to step in every time you think something in my life needs correcting."
Something shifts behind his expression then, quick enough that I almost miss it.
"You were going to miss the window," he says, quieter now. "By four days."
I look down at the revised timeline spread across the counter and hate that I understand immediately what he's fixed. The re-inspection date works now. The contractor's original sequence didn't.
Which means later, when I’m less angry, I’ll probably have to admit he fixed it.
I hate that too.
"You still don't get to decide for me," I say.
There's a pause before he answers, like he's weighing a different version of this conversation and discarding it in real time. "I could have called," he says.
"Yeah," I say. "You could have."
We walk the back corridor together, because the contractor left notes I need to review and Callum has apparently decided he's reviewing them with me.
He moves through the narrow space with a methodical patience that makes it feel even narrower, the kind of focused attention that belongs to someone who grew up around real estate and learned early how buildings fit together from the inside out.
I follow half a step behind and watch him clock things I'd have walked past: the shelving brackets marked for removal, the contractor's notes on the wall where the built-in shelving will go, the egress lighting, the angle of the ceiling joists, until he stops in front of the grey panel housing set into the rear wall.
I've passed that panel every day for the three years I've owned the store, and for most of the twenty-five before that when it was my father's, and I've never given it a single thought.
Callum slows in front of it with that particular quality of focus I've started to recognize, the one that isn't waiting or pausing but is something more specific, the locked-in attention of a man confirming something he already knew was there.
He crouches slightly, just enough to shift the angle of my view, and his eyes move along the conduit bundle where it meets the bracket like he's guiding my attention without saying that's what he's doing.
"What are you looking at?" I ask.
"Old wiring." He takes out his phone, photographs the panel, and straightens. "I'll have someone check it."
There's a fraction of a beat before the last word. Not long enough to name, exactly, but enough that I notice it, the way you notice a step that's slightly shorter than the others. His voice has the specific smoothness of an answer that's been selected rather than arrived at.
He looks at the panel again before he steps back, like he's deciding whether to say more and choosing not to.
I file the whole exchange in the part of my brain that keeps track of the difference between what people say and what they decide not to.
I don't let him move on.
"We're done here," I say, and step back toward the main floor, not waiting to see if he agrees but making sure he follows.
I walk him straight to the front door.
"I'm leasing a pop-up from you," I say, keeping my voice even as I reach past him to open it. "That's the extent of your involvement in my business."
He studies me for a second, something shifting behind his expression that doesn’t quite settle, like he’s weighing a different answer before discarding it. "Your building needs to pass inspection."
"Which I will handle," I say. "You don't get to make decisions for me."
His mouth shifts like there's an answer sitting there he could give me and he's choosing not to. "You're still inside the window," he says instead.
"That's not the point," I say.
"It's the only point that matters," he says, but there’s a beat before it, like he knows it isn’t the only point and is choosing it anyway.
I hold the door open. "Out."
“You can be mad after re-inspection,” he says.
“I’m already mad.”
“Yeah.” He gives a small shrug. “But now it’s scheduled.”
I hold the door open another inch. “Out.”
He doesn't move for a beat, then he does, stepping past me into the afternoon light without touching me, which feels suspiciously intentional.
He glances back. “You’ll still be mad later.”
“That’s the dream.”
His mouth shifts like he almost smiles.
Then he turns and walks down Harbor View.