The Banner Comes Loose #2
She didn’t look. She pulled the printed vendor map from her clipboard, smoothed the rain-warped corner, and watched the paper curl up again.
Fix the banner. Call the electrician. Confirm insurance. Pay Benny. Build bank packet. Stop Grant. Calm board. Protect Dad’s festival.
Seven days.
Friday at five.
The list looked almost manageable if she didn't blink.
Then Pete Mercer, still holding the forbidden ladder, said, “Could ask Brooks.”
Silence moved through the group in a way no weather report could have predicted.
Emily looked up slowly. “No.”
Pete shrugged. “Just saying.”
“Then unsay it.”
Aunt Mabel perked up. “Nathan Brooks is back?”
Mrs. Alvarez crossed herself, which was dramatic considering she had once described Nathan as polite and too thin.
Grant’s expression shifted so quickly Emily would have missed it if she hadn't spent years learning the civic uses of a nearly-smile. “Nathan Brooks is in town?”
“Not my information to archive,” Mabel said, which meant yes.
Chloe looked at Emily as if deciding whether to step in front of her or behind her. “His company has crews on the Inn this week. Inspection, maybe. I heard it from Leo, who heard it from the guy delivering tile, who heard it from someone with a clipboard. So, legally, that makes it gospel.”
The old Harbor Cove Inn sat at the north end of Main Street, all white railings and peeling porches and stubborn memories. Nathan Brooks’s family had bought it, promised to restore it, fought with half the town, and left a scar no one could point to without starting another argument.
Nathan had left before the shouting finished.
Or because of it.
Or after causing it.
Harbor Cove had never agreed on that part, which hadn't stopped anyone from telling the story with confidence.
Emily had been twenty-three the last time she saw him, standing near the marina with a duffel over one shoulder and a face that made everyone else’s anger look loud.
She had disliked how calm he seemed. She had disliked even more that he looked at the town like he was memorizing it against his will.
Now he was back. With crews. With money. With exactly the sort of public baggage Atlantic Coast Community Bank wouldn't want near its wholesome coastal-community campaign.
And enough liquidity to keep Benny’s fryer hot through opening weekend.
“No,” Emily said again, because once hadn't been enough.
Grant’s smile returned in pieces. “For once, we agree. Nathan Brooks is the last person this festival needs.”
That should have comforted her.
It didn't.
Chloe took the clipboard out of Emily’s hand. Emily reached for it, then stopped when Chloe lifted one eyebrow.
“You’re doing the thing,” Chloe said.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you try to hold paper hard enough that reality improves.”
“I have several realities filed in there.”
“And all of them are wet.”
A gust shoved rain sideways across the grounds. Tyler sneezed from inside the lantern crate. Pete finally set down the ladder, offended. The Atlantic Coast logo stared up from the mud like evidence.
Emily looked from the banner to Grant to the bank email glowing on her phone.
Nathan Brooks.
No.
The name belonged in old arguments, not in her emergency plan. It belonged in whispered adult conversations from years ago, in the Inn’s boarded windows, in her father’s tired sigh when the town split itself into sides over a building no one could afford to save and everyone claimed to love.
It didn't belong on her Monday morning checklist.
“Emily,” Chloe said, quieter now, “I’m not saying call him.”
“Good.”
“I’m saying know what all your options are before Grant tells everyone you ran out of them.”
Grant adjusted his cuff. “I’m standing right here.”
“We know,” Chloe said. “It’s been the tone problem of the morning.”
Emily took back the clipboard. The top page had a rain smear through the vendor deposit column. She wrote three words in the margin before she could talk herself out of it.
brOOKS — DO NOT CALL
Then she underlined DO NOT twice.
The ink bled anyway.
Across the grounds, the festival arch leaned over the fallen bank banner, the lighthouse blinked through rain, and Harbor Cove waited for her to prove that everything was still under control.
Emily capped the pen, lifted her chin, and walked toward the mud.
“Tyler,” she called, “get out of the lanterns. Chloe, call Leo about the banner brackets. Pete, step away from the ladder before I have to create a form about you. Mrs. Alvarez, I need your biggest tray and your calmest face at Town Hall in forty minutes.”
“And Grant?” Chloe asked.
Emily looked at him.
Grant looked pleased, which helped.
“Grant can bring perspective,” she said. “Preferably from across the street.”
Harbor Cove moved.
Not smoothly. Not quietly. Not without Aunt Mabel muttering that the archive would have appreciated one photograph.
But it moved.
Emily bent, gripped the muddy edge of the sponsor banner, and pulled Atlantic Coast Community Bank out of the dirt.
By lunch, she would have a plan.
By Friday, she would have proof.
By next Monday, the festival would open.
And Nathan Brooks would stay exactly where she had written him: in the margin, underlined, and not called.
That was the plan.
Monday had already shown what it thought of her plans.