Page 1 of Working For Her Second Chance

Chapter 1

Macy

The welcome sign for Forge Creek is missing two bolts and leaning hard to the left, which feels like a metaphor I didn't ask for. Population 3,200, though someone scratched a line through the two and wrote a one beneath it in silver paint pen. Encouraging. If this sign were a project proposal, my firm would reject it on visual presentation alone.

My rental SUV kicks up gravel as the highway narrows into the county road that becomes Main Street, and the mountains do what they always did here—rise up on both sides like walls, trapping the sky into a narrow strip of blue that makes everything below feel closer. Tighter. More personal than a town this size has any right to be.

The old mill is gone—razed, from the look of the empty lot, though someone's laid fresh gravel and staked orange construction flags in a grid pattern that suggests plans. The storefronts on the south side of Main have scaffolding up, raw lumber and Tyvek wrap over what used to be a laundromat and a video rental place that was already dying when I left. New buildings going up beside the bones of old ones. The whole town has that half-finished look of something caught between what it was and what it's trying to become.

A feeling I know by floor plan.

The clock on the dash reads seven forty-two. My kickoff meeting at the construction staging area is at nine, which gives me exactly enough time to do the one thing I swore I wouldn't do: walk into Kincaid's Early Bird like I'm a teenager again looking for a booth by the window.

The spreadsheet on my laptop—"Forge Creek Revitalization: Master Timeline v.7"—has no line item for emotional detours. There's a contingency tab for weather delays, supplier issues, and permit complications. There is not a contingency tab for "returning to your hometown and having feelings about it." An oversight I'll be addressing in version eight.

The diner looks the same. Long and low, brick front, foggy windows bleeding condensation from the kitchen. The smell hits before the door swings shut behind me—bacon grease, coffee that's been on the burner since five, and something sweet underneath. Cinnamon rolls. The kind Marlene makes from a recipe she says is her grandmother's but adjusts every year because, as she once told my mother, "Grandma didn't know about butter."

The counter is the same worn Formica. The stools are the same cracked vinyl. And the spot at the end—the spot where I used to set up napkins and sugar caddies at five-thirty in the morning while a boy with a hard hat and a scar on his left palm drank black coffee and asked me quiet questions about load-bearing walls—that spot is empty.

Of course it's empty. It's been empty for twelve years. Things don't wait for you just because you remember them.

"Well, I'll be damned."

Marlene Kincaid stands behind the counter with a coffee pot in each hand, one regular and one decaf. She's grayer than I remember. Smaller, maybe. Her apron is the same faded green,and the silver streaks in her hair catch the fluorescent light like wire.

"Macy Sinclair." She sets both pots down and puts her hands on her hips. "As I live and breathe."

"Hey, Marlene."

She comes around the counter and hugs me before I can decide whether I'm ready for it. She smells like coffee grounds and dish soap, and her arms are stronger than they look. My throat tightens. I press my lips together and count to four, the way you count before you touch a wire you’re not certain is dead.

"Sit." She points to a booth by the window—my old booth. "Coffee's on the house. Are you eating?"

"Just coffee. I've got a meeting at nine."

"The revitalization thing." She pours without asking how I take it, and gets it right—black, no sugar. All this time and she remembers. "Whole town's buzzing about it. About time, if you ask me." She pauses, rag in hand, and gives me a look that could strip paint. "Your mama would've loved seeing this place get a face-lift."

The mention lands in the soft spot between my ribs. "She would have."

"Mm-hmm." The rag moves across a counter that doesn't need cleaning. "You doing all right up there in Denver?"

"I'm doing great."

"Mm-hmm," she says again, which is Marlene for I have elected not to believe you but I'm going to let you sit with your own nonsense for a minute.

The coffee is perfect—hot and slightly burnt, the way only a diner can make it. Outside, Main Street is waking up. A truck idles at the stoplight. A woman in a Carhartt jacket carries a box into the hardware store. The mountains do their steady, immovable thing above it all.

Six months. That's the job. Oversee the architectural plans for the downtown revitalization, coordinate with contractors and utility crews, get the project through to the handoff phase, and go back to Denver with a portfolio piece that'll make every firm in the state pay attention. Clean. Professional. A career move, not a homecoming.

"You've got that look," Marlene says, refilling my mug even though I've barely touched it. Preemptive pouring. A power move.

"What look?"

"The one you had when you left. Like you're already planning your exit from the entrance." She tucks the pot back into its warmer. "There's nothing wrong with ambition, sweetheart. But I've seen your type. You plan so hard you forget to show up for the thing you're planning."

The thing about Marlene is that she means well and she's annoying about it. My mother loved her—they worked shifts together for a while, back when Mom was still doing the overtime that slowly hollowed her out. I have this image of my mother that won't leave. Tuesday nights, coming through the door at eleven with the plant still on her—the chemical tang of the processing line caught in her hair, her jacket, the creases of her hands. She'd eat standing at the kitchen counter because sitting down meant admitting how tired she was, and admitting it meant she might not get back up. Saltines and peanut butter, standing in her socks on the linoleum, chewing with her eyes half-closed. And on the counter beside her elbow, always, the manila folder with my scholarship applications. The plan. Her plan for me, written in the hours she didn't sleep so I could have the life she didn't get.

When Mom got sick, Marlene was there. Brought casseroles that nobody ate. Sat in the hospital chair during the night shifts.And then after, when grief was this thing I couldn't fit into a timeline, Marlene never asked me to pretend I was fine.