CHAPTER 1
°°°
Emery Cade had gotten good at not counting.
She didn't count the days since she'd left — three hundred and thirty-something, not that she was keeping track — and she didn't count how many times a week she thought about a man who lived nineteen minutes from her shop by the back roads, fourteen if she took the highway, which she never did, because the highway ran past the clubhouse and she'd made a rule about that in October and broken it exactly once.
What she counted, standing in the doorway of Winters & Wax with a torn stitch in her hand and sunlight coming in gold and low through the front window, was leather.
"Talk to me," she said, and set the wallet down on the workbench like it might argue with her.
It was a good wallet. Bridle leather, hand-dyed, the kind of piece that came in from a guy who'd paid too much for it online and then wondered why the seam had already blown after four months.
She turned it over under the lamp, found the culprit — a lock stitch that had never been pulled tight, sloppy work from whoever'd made it before it landed on her bench for repair — and reached for her awl without having to look for it.
Her hands had known where everything lived in this shop for three years now.
Longer than she'd known where anything lived in her own marriage, some days.
She didn't let herself finish that thought. She'd gotten good at that too.
Winters & Wax had started as a workbench in the back corner of a rented storefront that used to sell vacuum cleaners, back when she still had a joint bank account and had to explain to Rhys why she needed six hundred dollars for a stitching machine instead of a vacation.
She hadn't asked anyone's permission for anything in eleven months now.
There was a particular freedom in that, sharp-edged and lonely in equal measure, the kind of freedom you didn't put on a business card.
The shop smelled like neatsfoot oil and coffee gone cold in the same mug she'd been refilling since eight that morning, and the light coming through the front window this time of day always turned the hanging belts and half-finished bags into something almost beautiful, like the whole room had been dipped in something warm.
She'd built this. All of it, stitch by stitch, with her own two hands and a business loan she'd cosigned alone because she hadn't wanted his name on a single piece of paper that was hers.
Which was, she supposed, the problem she was about to have to solve.
The bell over the door gave its cheerful little chime, incongruous with the industrial hum of the shop — leather conditioner and machine oil, the specific smell of a place that made things with its hands — and Priya stuck her head around the curtain that separated the front counter from the back workroom.
"You've got the face," Priya said.
"I don't have a face."
"You've got the leather face. The one where you're murdering a wallet instead of thinking about something."
"I'm not thinking about anything." Emery pulled the stitch tight, satisfying in the way that repetitive, correct work always was. "I'm thinking about this wallet."
"Uh-huh." Priya came the rest of the way in, dropped a stack of mail on the corner of the bench, out of range of the leather dye.
Twenty-six years old, three earrings in one ear and none in the other, better with the sewing machine than Emery had been at twice her experience — Emery had hired her a year ago mostly on the strength of a portfolio held together with a paperclip, and it had turned out to be the best decision she'd made in a year full of decisions she wasn't proud of.
"There's something from the title company in there. I didn't open it. I know the rule."
The rule. Emery had a lot of rules now. Don't open anything with that particular return address without sitting down first. Don't drive the highway past the clubhouse.
Don't check whether his motorcycle was parked outside The Wrenhouse before she went in for coffee, even though the diner had the best coffee in three counties and she'd been going there since she was nineteen years old and wasn't about to stop just because her own name was on the deed next to his and neither of them had done anything about it in eleven months.
She set down the awl. Wiped her hands on the shop rag, though there was nothing on them yet.
"Give it here."
The envelope was heavier than it should've been, the kind of paper title companies used when they wanted you to take something seriously.
She read it standing up, which was a mistake, because by the second paragraph her knees wanted the stool and she made herself stay upright out of pure stubbornness.
Expansion financing approved — contingent on. Contingent on. There it was, right where she'd known it would be if she let herself think about it, which was exactly why she hadn't: both signatures of record required to modify the deed of trust prior to disbursement. Window closes in six weeks.
Six weeks.
She'd been trying to get the second location off the ground for eight months.
A real shop, not a workbench in the back of a rented storefront — somewhere with room for a second sewing station, room to teach the class she kept getting asked about, room to be something bigger than herself alone with a needle and thread.
The bank had finally said yes. The bank had finally said yes, and the only thing standing between her and yes was a signature that belonged to a man she'd left in the middle of the night eleven months ago with her wedding ring sitting on the kitchen counter like a period at the end of a sentence she hadn't been able to finish saying out loud.
Because of course it was tied to The Wrenhouse.
Of course the collateral the bank wanted, the thing that made her numbers work, was the half-interest she still held in a garage-and-diner off Route 9 that she and Rhys had bought together six years ago with a wedding gift from his uncle and every dollar of savings they'd had between them.
She remembered standing in the empty garage bay the day they closed on it, dust motes hanging in the light, Rhys spinning her in a slow circle with his hands at her waist and telling her they were going to make something that lasted.
She'd believed him. That was the part that still snagged, some nights — not that he'd lied, exactly, but that she'd believed him so completely, and hadn't thought to ask what he meant by lasted, or whether he meant the same thing by it that she did.
She'd told herself for eleven months that the property was just paperwork. A technicality she'd get around to. She had not once let herself think about what getting around to it would actually require.
"Bad news?" Priya asked, careful, the way you asked when you already knew.
"Complicated news." Emery set the letter down, then picked it back up, because leaving it on the bench felt like she was pretending it wasn't real. "I need — " She stopped. Started again. "I need to make a call."
"To the person the rule's about."
Emery didn't answer that, which was its own kind of answer, and Priya had worked here long enough to know not to push past a silence like that one.
"You want me to lock up early? I can finish the wallet."
"No. No, I've got it." She didn't, particularly, but her hands wanted the work more than her head wanted to sit still with this, and the truth was she'd rather be doing something with her fingers when she made this decision than sitting frozen at the counter staring at a phone.
Priya lingered a second longer than the moment required, then seemed to decide against saying whatever she'd been about to say, and disappeared back through the curtain to the front counter.
Emery heard her turning the register drawer, the small ordinary sounds of a shop winding down toward evening, and was grateful, not for the first time, for an employee who knew when curiosity needed to lose to kindness.
She went back to the wallet. Finished the stitch. Oiled the leather, buffed it, checked the seam twice more than she needed to because checking things twice more than necessary was another thing she'd gotten very good at.
It was almost six by the time she let herself stop.
The shop emptied out slow — Priya gone by five-thirty with a wave and a look Emery pretended not to see, the last customer of the day picking up a repaired belt and telling her, unprompted, that he'd recommended her to his brother-in-law.
She locked the register. Swept the floor, though it didn't need it.
Stood at the front counter with her phone in her hand and the title company's letter next to it, and did the thing she'd been putting off since the bell above the door had gone quiet.
She knew his number. Of course she knew his number.
She'd known it for nine years, had it memorized before she'd had her own memorized, could probably have recited it in her sleep at three in the morning if someone had woken her up and demanded it.
She'd deleted the contact eleven months ago in an act of self-preservation that had accomplished exactly nothing, because deleting a number didn't delete the number, it just meant she had to type it out herself now, digit by digit, like she was dialing a stranger.
Her thumb hovered.
She thought about six weeks. She thought about the second location, the class she wanted to teach, the sign she'd already half-designed in her head with WINTERS on it and nothing else, because she'd built this alone and she wanted her name on it alone, and the ugly, complicated truth underneath that wanting: that the only way to get there ran straight through a conversation with the one person she'd spent eleven months organizing her whole life around not having.
She thought about the way he used to say her name like it was the best word he knew.
She dialed before she could talk herself out of it, and the thought that arrived clear and unwelcome in the half-second before it started to ring was that she still knew, without checking, that he'd be off shift by six and home by six-thirty, and that if she caught him now instead of later he'd pick up on the second ring instead of letting it go to voicemail out of some instinct to look unbothered.
It rang once.
It rang twice.
"Em?"
His voice hadn't changed. That was the stupid, useless thing her chest did first — before the fear, before the six weeks, before any of it — his voice hadn't changed at all, and some door she'd nailed shut a long time ago came half off its hinges just from two letters of her own name said the way only he said them.
"Hi," she said, and hated how small it came out. "It's — yeah. It's me."
"I know it's you. I've had your number memorized since 2015." A beat. She could hear something behind him — the low mechanical hum of the garage bay, a radio playing too quiet to make out the song. "You okay?"
Not are you calling to yell at me. Not what do you want. You okay. Eleven months, and his first instinct was still to check.
"I'm fine." She made herself say it steady. "I need to talk to you about The Wrenhouse. About the deed."
Silence on the line — not a long one, just long enough that she could picture exactly what he was doing with it, the way he used to go still and unreadable right before he said something that cost him something.
She'd learned that stillness over nine years.
She still knew it in her body better than she knew most things.
"Okay," he said finally. Careful. "When."
"Soon. There's a — there's a window. It's time-sensitive."
"Okay," he said again, and this time there was something underneath it she couldn't quite name, hope or dread or both at once, the two of them tangled together the way they'd been tangled together in her chest since the letter had landed on her counter twenty minutes ago.
"Tell me when and where, Em. I'll be there. "
She gave him a day. Not a place — she wasn't ready to decide on a place yet, wasn't sure her legs would carry her through the door of The Wrenhouse or his place or anywhere that belonged to the life she'd left, and he didn't push for one, which she noted and didn't examine too closely.
"Thursday," she said. "I'll call you Wednesday and tell you where."
"Thursday," he repeated, like he was writing it somewhere permanent. "Em — "
"I have to go," she said, too fast, and hung up before he could finish whatever he'd been about to say, because she'd learned a long time ago that she could survive almost anything from Rhys Cade except the sound of him saying her name like he still meant every version of it.
She stood in the dark shop for a long moment after, phone still warm in her hand, the letter from the title company sitting on the counter where she'd left it, six weeks suddenly feeling like both an eternity and no time at all.
Outside, the streetlight buzzed on. She still hadn't decided where to meet him. She had a feeling, standing there, that she already knew — that some part of her had known since she'd read the words both signatures of record required — and that the knowing scared her more than the deadline did.