Chapter 3
Ladder Rules
By Wednesday, Lucy had established three important facts.
First, Ben was annoyingly competent.
Second, he hummed while he worked.
Third, the old crush she had buried under ten years of common sense had apparently been preserved in excellent condition.
"Hold this," Ben said.
Lucy took the length of painted wood he handed her.
"I am holding it."
"You're glaring at it."
"I can do both."
They were building the portable display wall in the library's basement workshop, a room that had once been storage and now contained craft supplies, broken chairs, and enough cardboard to construct a second library.
Ben had redesigned Lucy's original plan in ten minutes.
She hated that his version was better.
"The base needs another brace," he said.
"My diagram had two."
"Your diagram assumed the floor was level."
"The floor should be level."
"The floor was installed in 1911. It has had a difficult life."
Lucy crouched beside him. "You're enjoying this."
"A little."
He smiled without looking up.
She studied the side of his face, then forced her attention back to the wood.
This was exactly why she had once needed three months and an aggressively bad haircut to get over him.
Ben was easy to like. He talked to everyone. He remembered names. He had spent twenty minutes earlier helping Mr. Alvarez figure out why his phone kept enlarging every webpage. When a patron dropped a stack of books, Ben had picked them up without interrupting his conversation.
There was nothing special about the way he was kind to Lucy.
That was the rule she had learned years ago.
"You still make that face," he said.
Lucy froze. "What face?"
"The one where you're arguing with someone who isn't in the room."
"I don't make a face."
"You do. Mara used to call it your courtroom expression."
"Mara has betrayed me in many ways."
He laughed.
The sound filled the cramped workshop, warm and unguarded.
Lucy looked down too late.
"There," Ben said quietly.
"There what?"
"You smiled."
"I smile regularly."
"Not at me."
The sentence landed between them with more weight than it deserved.
Ben glanced up.
Lucy could not tell whether he was teasing anymore.
Then Priya's voice came through the open door.
"Lucy? The pumpkin vendor is on line two and sounds emotionally fragile."
Lucy stood so quickly she nearly hit her head on a shelf.
"Coming."
She left the workshop, grateful for the interruption.
The pumpkin vendor had lost half his crop to an early frost. Lucy spent twenty minutes rearranging the contest order, calling a second farm outside the city, and recalculating the budget.
When she finally hung up, Ben was standing beside the desk.
"Problem?"
"Solved."
"That wasn't the question."
Lucy looked at him.
"Half the pumpkins are gone. The replacement ones cost more. I can make it work."
"How?"
"Reduce the decorative order for the courtyard. Move twelve planters from the reading terrace. Ask the cafe to donate hay bales instead of charging us."
Ben leaned against the desk.
"You did that in twenty minutes?"
"It's my job."
"No. Your job is librarian."
"Community programming is part of it."
"Lucy."
She disliked the way her name sounded when he said it like that. Too observant.
"What?"
"You're allowed to say something is hard even if you can fix it."
Her first instinct was to make a joke.
Instead, she looked at the list in front of her.
"It's a little hard."
Ben nodded once, as if she had handed him something fragile.
"Okay. What can I take?"
The question was so simple that Lucy almost refused on instinct.
Then she pushed the vendor contact sheet across the desk.
"Call the cafe about the hay bales."
Ben picked it up.
"Done."
Lucy watched him walk away.
Maybe accepting help was not the same thing as needing rescue.
That felt like a dangerous idea.