CHAPTER 9
Mae
The recycling count was wrong.
I stood in the vendor area at six forty-five on Sunday morning with the clipboard I’d left on the counter the night before, tallying blue bins against the pickup manifest, and the number was off by two.
I’d confirmed the count Saturday afternoon, logged it, initialed the manifest, and now the number was wrong, which meant either someone had moved bins after I left or I had miscounted, and I did not miscount.
I counted again. Still wrong. The early light was flat and gray through the loading bay, and the concrete smelled like hose water and cardboard.
My coffee was on the counter behind me, cooling past the point of rescue.
I’d been here since six fifteen, which was early even for me, but sleep had not been a realistic option after midnight, and by five I’d stopped pretending and started a list. Everything that needed doing after a Saturday Showcase, written in order, because order was how I kept the day from becoming something I couldn’t steer.
Theo’s name was not on the list. The list was for tasks.
The two missing bins turned up behind the loading bay door, wedged at an angle that suggested someone had shoved them out of the way in a hurry.
I dragged them to the curb lineup, and the scrape of plastic on concrete was loud in the empty lot.
My arms worked fine. My back was sore in a place that didn’t come from lifting bins, and I didn’t think about why, and then I thought about why, and then I stopped thinking and dragged the second bin harder than necessary.
I envied the robin on the vendor green. Nobody had ever asked a robin to reconcile vendor receipts six hours after making a decision that made coffee taste wrong and door handles feel personal.
Inside, the building was quiet the way it only got on Sunday mornings—overhead lights on their low cycle, the vendor hall stripped to bare tables and folded signage. I walked the hall checking doors. Office, locked. Utility closet, locked.
The supply room door was closed. I’d locked it last night. Twice, technically—once with Theo inside it and once after.
I checked the deadbolt, confirmed it was secure, and kept walking.
The metal turned smoothly under my hand, the same way it had twelve hours ago when I’d turned it from the inside, and my stomach dropped half an inch before I pulled my hand off the knob.
My skin held the memory before my brain authorized it—the feel of the deadbolt under my thumb while his mouth was on my neck, the click that had sounded final and chosen and completely mine.
I wiped my palm on my jeans. It didn’t help.
I went back to the vendor area and picked up my clipboard.
The follow-up email to Diane needed specifics.
I drafted it standing up, using my phone, because sitting down felt like permission to stop moving.
Three paragraphs. Professional, tonally correct, the kind of email I could write during a power outage with one hand.
I read it twice and caught myself checking the cc line for a name I had no reason to add.
I sent it without the name. Then I reorganized the counter supplies—pens into the cup, sign-in binder squared against the edge, the vendor contact sheet realphabetized even though it was already alphabetical.
My hands kept reaching for the next task before the current one finished, which was how I operated under pressure, except this pressure had nothing to do with evaluation timelines and everything to do with the fact that twelve hours ago I had wrapped my legs around a man in this building and I could still feel the shelf brackets against my shoulder blades if I stood still long enough to let my body talk.
I did not stand still.
At seven twenty, I heard a truck in the lot.
I knew the engine. I hated that I knew the engine—that Theo Hart’s truck had become a sound my ears separated from traffic without my permission.
He would be here because he’d left equipment yesterday.
Tripod bag, the LED panel. Professional materials in a professional building.
There was no reason for my pulse to do anything about it.
My pulse did something about it anyway.
The side door opened. Footsteps in the hall—not hesitant, not performative. Just a man walking into a building where he’d left his things.
He came around the corner carrying his tripod bag over one shoulder.
His hair was damp. He’d showered recently enough that I could tell from eight feet away, and I resented that I’d noticed before I’d decided to look.
He was wearing a shirt I hadn’t seen before—dark green, soft-looking, untucked—and I resented that too, the newness of it, as if he’d chosen clothes this morning with some awareness that the previous version of getting dressed no longer applied.
“Morning,” he said.
“Recycling count was off,” I said. “I fixed it.”
He set the tripod bag on the nearest table.
Looked at me. Not the way he’d looked at me before the supply room—the calibrated attention, the photographer reading the room.
This was flatter. Steadier. The look of a man who had seen me without calibration and was not going to pretend he could go back to the viewfinder version.
“I left the LED panel in the back,” he said.
“I know. It’s by the utility closet.”
He didn’t move toward the utility closet. He leaned against the table edge, arms crossed, and the casualness of it was wrong—not performed, just present, the way you stand in a space you’ve stopped treating as someone else’s.
Across the vendor table, my body remembered what the morning had no business carrying. I knew what his hands felt like. I knew what sound he made. A clipboard was not thick enough to make those facts professional.
“Diane wants a follow-up summary by Tuesday,” I said. “I’ll need your photo selects for the documentation package. Can you send them by tomorrow?”
“Yeah, Mae.”
My name in his mouth landed differently now. He’d said it in meetings, on the green, once in the south tent, once in the supply room with his forehead against mine. The ordinariness of it—just my name, just his voice, just morning—was harder to manage than anything he’d said in the dark.
I looked down at the manifest. The numbers were correct. I’d already verified them. I was staring at confirmed data because it was easier than looking at him standing in the vendor area like he belonged in it, like belonging in it was no longer a question he needed to ask.
“The supply room needs restocking before next weekend,” I said. “Signage rolls are low.”
“Okay.”
“And someone moved the banner vinyl to the wrong shelf.”
“Mae.” Quiet. Just my name with a period after it, like he was setting it down on the counter between us to see if I’d pick it up.
I looked at him. His jaw was set, but not the way it set when he was holding something back—more like a man who’d decided to hold still and let whatever was happening happen without directing it.
He wasn’t making this easy. He wasn’t making it hard.
He was just there, taking up the same amount of room he always had, except the room felt different around him now, and the difference was mine, not his.
“What,” I said.
“Nothing.” He uncrossed his arms. “I’ll get the panel.”
He didn’t move yet. He stood there for two more seconds, and I understood that he was giving me something I hadn’t asked for.
He was not going to chase a conversation I wasn’t starting.
He was also not going to pretend the supply room had been an ordinary Saturday night.
He stood between those two things, and the precision of it irritated me because it meant he understood me well enough to know that either extreme would have given me something to push against, and he wasn’t offering me that.
Then he walked past me toward the back hallway, close enough that I caught soap and something under it—wood, maybe, or just skin, just the specific way Theo smelled when he was close and not touching me, which was now a thing I knew and could not unlearn.
My breath caught once, shallow, in the top of my chest. I held the clipboard tighter and did not turn around.
His footsteps moved down the hall. I heard the utility closet door open. The click of the LED panel case latches.
My phone buzzed. I looked at it because looking at it was a task.
Diane. A text, not an email, which meant it was either urgent or personal, and with Diane those categories had a tendency to share a wall.
Mae, Sandra’s assistant just called. They want you and the photographer at the municipal building Wednesday for a brief follow-up. Documentation review. Can you confirm by noon?
You and the photographer. I read the and twice. Conjunctions did not usually require rereading.
Down the hall, the panel case clicked shut. His footsteps came back—steady, unhurried.
He came back into the vendor area. Panel case in one hand, tripod bag resettled on his shoulder.
I could have texted him later. Forwarded the message through the official channel, kept the roles labeled, made sure nobody’s name sat next to mine in a sentence I hadn’t vetted. That was the move I would have made forty-eight hours ago without thinking about it.
“Wednesday,” I said, holding up the phone so he could read it. “Sandra’s team wants a documentation review. Both of us.”
He read the screen. His eyes moved to mine.
Something shifted in his expression—not satisfaction, not pressure.
Recognition. Like he’d been watching to see what I’d do with the first shared obligation, and I’d done it face-to-face instead of through a forwarded email, and he knew exactly what that cost me even if I wasn’t going to explain it.
“What time?” he said.
“She hasn’t said yet. I’ll confirm and send you the details.”
“You could just tell me. I’m here.”
“I’ll send the details,” I said, “because that’s how the coordination chain works.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. The ghost of one—the kind that happens when someone catches you building procedure around a feeling and doesn’t bother pointing out that the feeling came first.
“Wednesday,” he said.
“Wednesday.”
He left through the side door. The latch caught behind him, and the sound was ordinary, and I stood in the vendor area with my clipboard and Diane’s text still on my screen, and I typed the reply before I could rethink it.
Confirmed. We’ll be there.
I could have made it one coordinator, one photographer, two clean replies. Instead I sent the sentence as it stood.
I put the phone in my pocket and felt the message sit there like the supply room key had settled there last night—small, warm, and heavier than its size.
Outside, his truck started. Reversed. Pulled out of the lot. I didn’t watch. Watching would have been a thing I’d have to put somewhere, and I was running out of places that fit.
I turned back to the manifest. The numbers were correct.
The bins were at the curb. The email was sent.
The supply room was locked and the banner vinyl was on the wrong shelf and none of those facts had changed, and all of them felt different now, and the difference was not something I could fix with a clipboard or a task list or a door that locked from the inside.
My phone buzzed again. Diane, replying fast the way she did when Sandra’s office was already pressing.
Perfect. 10 AM Wednesday. Sandra’s team wants the full image package reviewed alongside your public response summary. They’re especially interested in the launch photo. Bring Theo’s selects if you have them.
I should have felt the edge of something slipping. Instead what I felt was the strange, grim weight of a thing clicking into place—not comfortable, not welcome, just accurate, the way a number is accurate after you’ve counted it three times and it keeps coming back the same.
I opened the task list on my phone and added one line: Wednesday, 10 AM, municipal building, documentation review. I did not write Theo’s name next to it. Diane’s reply had already put him there.
I picked up the clipboard. The bins were at the curb. The morning was still mine to run.
I ran it.