21. Leah
LEAH
The storefront still smelled like sawdust and cold plaster, drop cloths draped over what would eventually be a consultation table, paint samples taped to the exposed brick in a row of blues I couldn't decide between.
I'd come in before the rink opened for the afternoon session, just to sit with the space for an hour the way I did most mornings now, notebook open on my knee, coffee going lukewarm on the windowsill.
The notebook was leather, battered soft at the corners, held together at this point by stubbornness and a rubber band I'd wrapped around it back in Denver.
I'd started three different planning apps since moving here and abandoned all of them within a week.
Something about a pen against paper made the lists feel real in a way a screen never managed, made the plans feel like promises instead of suggestions I could swipe away.
I hummed while I worked. I'd been told this, more than once, by people who found it either charming or mildly unsettling depending on the day, and I never noticed I was doing it until somebody pointed it out.
Some tuneless, wandering thing, off-key in a way that would have embarrassed me if I'd been doing it on purpose.
"Twelve booths are confirmed for spring.
" I said it out loud, the way I always did when a list needed weight behind it, steady and certain, the voice I used for clients when a wedding felt like it was unraveling around them and somebody needed to sound like they had it handled.
"Six vendors are still pending. The lighting quote is due by end of week. "
I never used that voice on myself. It occurred to me, sitting there with cold coffee and warm plaster dust catching the light, that I probably should more often.
My phone buzzed against the windowsill. Doris.
Meet me at the cider stand. Bring cash. This concerns you directly.
I left the notebook where it was, propped the door with a paint can the way Doris had shown me, and walked the two blocks to the square.
The ice rink had already filled with the after-lunch crowd, kids in borrowed skates windmilling across the ice while their parents huddled near the boards with cocoa.
The cider stand sat steaming at the edge of it all, and Doris stood behind the counter with a clipboard that had no business being at a cider stand, checking something off with the focus of a woman running actual accounts.
"There she is." Doris didn't look up from the clipboard. "Right on schedule. I had you down for one o'clock and it's five past. You're costing me money."
"What exactly am I costing you money on?"
"The pool." She turned the clipboard around, and I found a hand-ruled grid of names, dates, and dollar amounts that took me a full three seconds to understand. "Engagement pool. You and the chief. Half this town's had money on when it happens since the tree lighting."
"There's a betting pool on my relationship?"
"There's a betting pool on everything in this town eventually. Yours just happened to be popular." She tapped a line halfway down the sheet. "Maddie had you at twelve days. Somebody's about to collect."
"Twelve days from what?"
"From the kiss, obviously." Doris said it like I'd asked something genuinely strange.
"Half the square watched him kiss you in front of a lit-up spruce tree and a town council member mid-speech.
You think that stays quiet? I had the news by breakfast the next morning, and I don't even leave my house before nine. "
"We haven't even talked about anything official."
"Honey, the man walked you to your car for two weeks running before he worked up the nerve to do anything about it.
This town clocked what was happening before you did.
" She said it without an ounce of malice, warm in the particular way Doris managed to be blunt and kind in the same breath.
"Nobody's judging. We're just betting on the timeline. It's tradition."
"That's deeply unsettling."
"It's affectionate. There's a difference.
" She slid a cup of cider across the counter without being asked, on the house, the way she always did when she'd decided a conversation had gone on long enough to earn a peace offering.
"Drink your cider. Watch the rink. I have money on you two lasting past the new year, so don't go embarrassing my investment. "
I laughed despite myself, the sound coming out warmer than I expected, and carried the cider to the boards to watch the skaters, steam rising off the cup into air cold enough to sting.
That was where the couple found me, twenty minutes later, though found wasn't quite right. They picked the rink first, and I only happened to be standing close enough to watch the whole thing unfold.
He'd clearly planned it badly, which was somehow the part that made it work.
He got down on one knee on actual ice and wobbled hard enough that half the rink gasped before he caught himself on the boards.
Then he pulled a ring box out of his coat pocket, hands shaking too much to open it on the first try.
The girl, younger than me by a couple of years, had both hands pressed over her mouth before he'd even gotten the box open, and when he finally managed it, the whole rink dropped into that particular hush a crowd gets right before it explodes.
"Yes." She was already pulling him up off the ice before he'd finished the question, both of them laughing, both of them nearly going down together in a tangle of blades and scarves. "Yes, obviously yes, get up before you fall again."
The rink cheered loud enough to startle a flock of birds off the gazebo roof, and I clapped along with everyone else, cider forgotten in my hand. Something warm moved through my chest at the sight of two strangers deciding, badly and joyfully, to build something together.
She skated over to the boards afterward, cheeks red from cold and crying in roughly equal measure, and caught sight of the festival badge still clipped to my coat.
"Wait, you're the planner? The one who did all this?" She gestured at the whole square, lights and booths and the rink itself. "I've seen your name on the flyers."
"Leah Bennett. Congratulations, by the way. That was the least smooth proposal I've ever watched, and somehow the best one."
"He practiced for a week and still fell over." She was laughing again, breathless with it. "I need someone for the wedding. Is that insane, asking you right here on the ice?"
"Not even a little. It's exactly how I like getting hired."
"I don't even have a date yet. I have a ring and zero other decisions made."
"You don't need one yet. You need a phone number, and I happen to have several very good ones.
" I pulled a card from my coat pocket, one of the ones I'd had printed the week I signed the lease, and pressed it into her hand before either of us could talk ourselves out of the moment mattering.
"Call me whenever you're ready. No rush. Just don't lose the card."
She hugged me before I'd fully processed that it was happening, quick and fierce and smelling like cold air and cheap perfume, and skated back to her fiancé with my card clutched in one glove like it might blow away if she let go of it.
I stood there at the boards a long moment after they'd gone, watching the rink fill back in around the space where the proposal had happened, and let myself feel exactly how much that mattered.
Not a referral through the festival committee.
Not a favor from somebody who already knew my name.
A stranger on the ice, hiring me because she'd seen the work and wanted it for herself.
It felt different from every job I'd landed since Denver, steadier somehow, like something built out of my own hands instead of borrowed goodwill.
I was still smiling about it when I found Derek at the signage table an hour later, and the sight in front of me erased every other thought in my head.
He'd set up shop near the gazebo with a folding table, a stack of blank placards, and a label maker that looked like it had been liberated from an office supply closet sometime during the previous decade.
He held it the way he held most unfamiliar equipment, gripped too hard, jaw set, treating it like something that might detonate if he looked away.
"What are you doing?"
"Labeling the vendor signs. Digby wants them uniform." He didn't look up from the label maker, thumb jammed against a button that clearly wasn't cooperating. "This is not complicated. I run an entire fire department."
"How's that going?"
He held up the strip he'd just printed, and I had to read it twice before the words rearranged themselves into something sensible.
HOTC OCOA.
"It split the word in half."
"I'm aware."
"It says HOTC OCOA, Derek. That's supposed to be hot cocoa. You split it directly down the middle."
"The spacing algorithm on this device is hostile." He set it down on the table like it had personally wronged him, then picked it back up almost immediately, unwilling to concede the fight. "I've disarmed a gas leak with steadier hands than this thing requires."
I picked up one of the earlier signs he'd already finished, letters crooked, sloping downhill across the placard like they'd given up partway through the word. FRESH CIDER read more like FRESH C1DER, the numeral standing in for a letter I was fairly sure the machine hadn't intended to substitute.
"This lettering is structurally sound." He said it with the flat, unshakable authority he used on actual code violations, arms crossed, entirely serious. "It's just aesthetically assertive."
"It's crooked."
"It's confident."
"Derek."
"There's no fire code requirement for label symmetry. I checked." He absolutely had not checked, and the small, defiant tilt of his chin told me he knew I knew that. "As long as it's legible from ten feet, it passes inspection."
"It is not legible from ten feet. It says C1DER."
"That's a stylistic choice."
I lost it completely at that, laughing hard enough that I had to set my cider down before I spilled it, doubled over with one hand braced against the folding table while he stood there scowling at the label maker like it had insulted something he loved.
He didn't laugh with me, not right away, just watched me fall apart over a mangled hot cocoa sign with an expression caught somewhere between wounded pride and genuine delight at having caused it.
"It's not that funny."
"It's extremely that funny." I wiped one eye, still wheezing. "You look personally betrayed. By a label maker."
"I am the wronged party here. I bought that exact model for the station and it's never once given me trouble." He glared at it one more time, then, against what looked like his better judgment, the corner of his mouth gave in. "It says HOTC OCOA."
"It really does."
"That's genuinely upsetting."
We fixed the signs together after that, him holding the placards steady while I retyped the labels one letter at a time, both of us laughing every time the machine hiccupped on a fresh strip, Ember asleep under the table with his chin on Derek's boot like nothing about any of this concerned him in the slightest. The sun had gone low and gold over the rink by the time we finished, ice glowing amber, skaters thinning out toward dinner, and I sat back on my heels and watched Derek scowl one final time at a sign that finally, correctly, said HOT COCOA.
I hadn't laughed like that in longer than I could measure, easy and complete, without once checking to see if anyone was watching me do it.
Somewhere between Denver and now I'd learned to laugh carefully, half an eye always on how it looked, whether it was too loud, whether somebody might use it against me later the way Trevor once had.
Derek and a broken label maker had gotten past all of that without either of us noticing it happen.
Before we packed up the table, I tucked the whole afternoon away somewhere quiet in my chest, the proposal on the ice and the ruined cider sign and Doris's ridiculous betting pool folded together into one bright, ordinary day. I already knew I'd want it back on a harder one.