Chapter 6 #2
I close the door harder than necessary, lock it, and stand there for a second with my hand still on the bolt before I force myself to move. I know exactly why I'm angry about the contractor meeting and the timelines and him deciding he gets to make choices for me without asking.
What I don't know is whether part of this is the fact that neither of us said a single word about what happened yesterday in the stockroom, like we can just step around it and keep talking about permits and shelving plans instead.
The rest of the day doesn't give me any time to pull it back out.
There's a delivery dispute at the pop-up that eats forty minutes, a call from the city permits office about the re-inspection window, and a string of texts from Cordelia that are ostensibly about the Star column but are primarily an extended metaphor involving stale bread.
I'm reading one when Maureen Pike appears in the propped front doorway like she's been stage-managed into position, smile calibrated to exactly the frequency of weaponized warmth.
She steps inside without waiting to be invited, fingers light on the doorframe like she’s testing the paint. "I wanted to check in," she says. "Neighbor to neighbor."
I straighten a receipt stack on the counter and set the pen parallel to it. "Of course," I say, though Camarillo is hardly next door.
She takes two steps in, just far enough that her voice carries. "I heard about the citation. I hope it hasn’t been too disruptive."
Her eyes move over the shelves, the empty chairs, the front table.
“There are resources for businesses that don’t have quite the same access to private support.”
She lets the phrase sit for a second before adding, almost conversationally, “Or private intervention.”
I slide the register drawer closed. It clicks loudly in the quiet.
She smiles like we’re sharing something friendly.
“Leaning on a billionaire landlord to resolve a safety issue sends a message,” she says. “I just want to make sure you understand how that looks from the outside. From the community. From other independents navigating the same pressures without the same advantages.”
Her expression stays pleasant enough that if someone walked in right now they’d think she was giving me advice.
I fold my hands on the counter to keep them still. "I'm a small business owner leasing temporary space during remediation," I say. "I haven't teamed up with anyone to redevelop downtown, despite whatever version of this story you're trying to sell."
"Good." She nods once, satisfied. "Perception matters."
I nod back and keep my face neutral. I pick up a dust cloth and wipe a clean stretch of counter so I don’t say something that will get repeated back to me later.
She waits, watching for me to fill it.
I don’t.
The door chimes behind her and I look up, irritation spiking sharp because this is the worst possible moment for him to walk in and prove her point for her.
He stops just inside the threshold, close enough that I feel the shift of air before he moves again, and for a second neither of us says anything. His attention flicks to me, then to Maureen, then back, like he’s recalculating in real time.
He doesn’t step closer.
Which I notice more than if he had.
Maureen clocks him the second he crosses the threshold, and the change in her is immediate. The sharpness vanishes under a bright, effortless smile like someone flipped a switch behind her face.
"Callum," she says warmly, like she hasn't spent the last twenty-four hours posting about him leasing me the space in the first place. "I didn't realize you were stopping by today."
He gives her an easy nod, completely unaware of the transformation happening in front of him. "Maureen."
"I was just checking in on Avery." She steps a little closer to him, all polished ease now. "Though maybe I should've assumed she'd have support." Her laugh is light. "You still on the Harbor Revitalization Committee?"
"Yeah," he says. "We're finalizing the waterfront proposal next month."
"That's right." Her expression brightens further. "I actually wanted to talk to you about that. I had a few ideas about the small business integration side of the project and thought maybe we could grab coffee sometime this week and go over them."
Callum nods immediately, friendly and entirely oblivious to what she's trying to do. "You should bring them to Tom Callan first," he says. "He's heading the integration side of it. He'll be able to move things faster than I can."
Something flickers across her face before the smile catches it.
"Tom's been pulling together the preliminary layouts," Callum continues. "You and him working through it directly would probably help the whole committee. Everyone's looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with."
I watch the exact moment Maureen realizes she aimed for a private meeting and got redirected into a committee discussion instead.
Her smile never slips.
"That's a good point," she says smoothly. "I'll reach out to Tom."
She lets her gaze slide back to me, all sunshine now instead of steel. "I just stopped by to make sure you were all right," she says. "It looks like you are."
Then she turns toward the door. "I'll see you both around," she says lightly, already walking out.
Pancake wanders in like she’s been appointed to door duty, plants herself in the threshold, and watches Maureen leave with the air of someone mentally filing that interaction under "I told you so" before immediately turning to sniff the same spot.
I stand behind the register, already on edge, and when Callum steps closer my pulse jumps in a way I refuse to examine.
"Why do you keep showing up?"
He looks at me with the expression of a man who has a perfectly reasonable answer and knows I know he has it. "Did you want her to keep talking?"
He glances toward the counter, reaches into the folder he set down earlier, and slides a set of papers across to me.
“I stopped by to drop these,” he says. “Adjusted remediation contracts. You can handle them from here.”
I look down at the pages, then back up at him. “You really think you get to decide when I need help?”
His eyes stay on me for a second. “No.”
There’s a beat before he adds, “I think you decide that approximately ten minutes after refusing it.”
I stare at him. “That’s incredibly annoying.”
One side of his mouth shifts. “Thank you.”
I tap the contracts once against the counter. “Next time, start with that.”
“Sure,” he says, but it lands flatter than usual, like he’s already moving past the conversation before it’s finished, and then he turns and walks out.
Shane has been putting the final touches on the window display the entire time, watching the show.
He shakes his head. "That's just how guys like that operate."
It's the second time he's said that exact sentence to me in two days.
I watch his hands on the books and notice how steady they are. "Guys like what, exactly?" I ask.
"Men with that kind of reach." He steps back and checks the line of the display, tilts one title a degree to the left. "They're not necessarily wrong. They just make decisions for you and call it help, and then they look at you like you should be grateful for not being consulted."
I nod and go back to work.
The rest of the day disappears into deliveries, customer questions, paperwork, and the thousand small problems that come with running a bookstore out of a temporary location.
At closing I lock the pop-up and check the handle twice before heading out.
I cut down Harbor View toward the bookstore with the keys already in my hand. The store still smells like paper and dust and it’s quiet in a way it never is during the day.
I go straight to the back corridor.
I tell myself I’m checking something I should have seen earlier. I stand in front of the grey panel housing and see that the conduit bundle is sitting at the same wrong angle.
I lean in and follow the line of it the way I watched Callum do, from the bracket to where the bundle meets the rear wall, and something small catches the light just behind the bracket where the shadow pools deepest.
A cable tie.
Matte black, new, tucked just outside the sightline at a precise angle, placement that disappears unless you're already looking for it and know where to put the light.
I stay where I am because I didn’t put it there and the contractor hasn’t been near this panel since I left. Callum photographed this exact spot, called it old wiring, and left it at that.
I study the angle until it stops looking accidental. It isn’t wear. It’s placement, deliberate enough that I only see it now because Callum guided my attention somewhere else without saying that’s what he was doing.
I replay the corridor with him in sequence.
The pause at the panel, the photograph, “old wiring” delivered in a tone that was just a shade too smooth.
The pattern settles into place slowly and all at once, information moving around me instead of toward me while someone else decides how much I get to know.
The corridor feels tighter as I reach up and kill the overhead light, letting my phone beam cut across the bracket again. I grip the phone harder than I mean to, forcing myself to think through the certainty and doubt at the same time instead of reacting to either one.
If I’m wrong, I push away the only person keeping me ahead of this, and if I’m right, I’m already in it with a man who’s been deciding how much I’m allowed to know. I don’t know which it is, but I know I don’t get to ignore it.