Page 23 of Working For Her Second Chance

The screen door opens behind me.

"Morning." Her voice is sleep-rough, and the sound of it does something to my chest that should require medical attention.

She's in one of my flannels. Plaid. Two sizes too big. Sleeves past her wrists. Hair going in directions that defy physics. Both hands wrapped around my blue coffee mug—the one with the chip on the rim that I should have thrown away years ago.

She looks like she belongs on this porch. The thought hits with the force of a breaker tripping—sudden, total, everything going still.

"Morning."

She settles into the second chair. Hitch abandons me immediately, crosses to her, puts his head in her lap. The traitor's tail sweeps the boards.

"Your toast is cold," she says.

"That's because someone stole my mug."

"I'm not stealing. I'm redistributing resources."

"That's what all thieves say."

We orbit the same kitchen making breakfast, bumping elbows at the counter. She makes eggs—scrambled, with cheese, which she locates in the fridge confidently, having already mapped the contents and found them lacking.

"You have beer, mustard, and three kinds of hot sauce," she says. "And something in a container that I'm choosing not to investigate."

"It's chili."

"It was chili. It's evolved."

"It's fine."

"River, I have a graduate degree in structural analysis, and I'm telling you that whatever's happening in that container is structurally compromised."

I eat the eggs. She steals the last piece of toast. Hitch receives tributes from both sides. The morning is easy. Natural.

Terrifying in how normal it feels. Because normal has an expiration date. And the date is October.

She leaves around nine. Kisses me in the doorway in a way that makes Hitch turn away dignified, because he respects privacy but is keeping mental notes. Her SUV pulls down the gravel drive. The house goes quiet.

The silence of a house that had someone in it and doesn’t anymore. It has a specific frequency. A pitch.

Hitch sits at the front door and looks at me with an expression that says: She left. This is unacceptable. Please remedy immediately.

"She'll be back," I tell him, and I'm not sure which one of us I'm reassuring.

Monday morning. Professionalism snaps back into place like a breaker resetting. Hard hats. Blueprints. Two feet of deliberate space.

The performance lasts approximately forty-five minutes before she passes me the site map and her fingers brush mine and the entire crew pretends not to notice. Eddie catches my eye across the excavation and raises one eyebrow a single millimeter, which for Eddie is a standing ovation.

Hank has developed a sudden fascination with cloud formations whenever Macy and I are within five feet of each other. The man has never once looked at the sky in his career, and now he's studying cirrus patterns like he's applying for a position at the weather service. His commitment to plausible deniability is admirable if transparent.

Eddie finds me at the transformer replacement on Third around ten. Leans against the truck. Watches me work in silence for five minutes, which is Eddie building to something.

"So," he says.

"So."

"You look different."

"I got a haircut."