Page 25 of Working For Her Second Chance

Her phone rings. I hear it through the open kitchen window.

"David. Hi." A pause. "No, I'm—I'm available. What's going on?"

I don't mean to listen. The shop is twenty feet from the kitchen window and the yard carries sound, and I'm not eavesdropping so much as failing to not hear.

She moves to the porch. Through the shop's bay door I can see her—pacing, one hand on her hip, the other holding the phone. Her body language changes. She's animated. Hands moving. Shaping the air the way she does when she talks about design—the vision gesture, the this-is-what-I've-been-working-toward gesture. Whatever David is saying, it's lighting her up in a way that conduit phasing documents definitely weren't.

The call lasts eight minutes. I know because I count, the way I track intervals on a circuit test. Eight minutes of her pacing and talking and looking like a woman who just got handed something she wanted.

She comes back inside. Screen door closes. A minute later she appears at the shop door with two beers and a smile that's trying to be casual and isn't quite making it.

"Who was that?" Conversational. The tone of a man who definitely wasn't counting.

"David Olson. Just a check-in." She hands me the beer. "Partnership committee stuff. Nothing major."

Her eyes are bright. The same brightness she gets when she talks about design—the vision brightness. Whatever David said wasn't "nothing major." Nobody paces for eight minutes over nothing.

"Everything good?"

"Everything's fine." She leans against the workbench. Watches me thread the ignition wire. "How's the wiring?"

"Getting there."

I don't push. Pushing isn't what I do. I stand still and wait. But the waiting has a different texture this time—a tightness at the base of my spine, the same feeling I get when a transformer hums at the wrong pitch. Something running hot behind the casing that you can't see yet.

She's excited about something in Denver. Something she's not telling me.

She stays in the shop for an hour, sitting on the stool, passing me tools with the natural rhythm of someone who's learned where things go. Comfortable. Present. But her phone lights up twice more with texts she reads quickly and puts face-down.

She leaves at nine. Kiss in the doorway. Hitch's goodbye groan. Taillights down the drive.

The kitchen is quiet. Her mug in the sink. The chair where she sat still holding warmth, or the memory of warmth, which amounts to the same thing.

I stand in the shop. Hands on the workbench. Not working. Just standing there, listening to the silence she left in the kitchen and the silence she left the first time, and trying to tell the difference.

She said "I will" once. In a field. With stars. And then she was gone before dawn.

She said "just a check-in" tonight. With bright eyes and a pacing stride and a phone she kept turning face-down.

Maybe it is nothing. Maybe David Olson calls every partner-track associate on Saturday afternoons. Maybe the brightness was about the beer, not the phone call. Maybe I'm reading voltage where there's no current.

But my father taught me to trust the meter, not the assumption. Test the wire. Read the numbers. Believe what the instrument tells you, even when you don't want to.

The instrument is telling me that Denver called, and Macy answered, and whatever she heard made her light up in a way that Forge Creek doesn't.

I wash her mug. Put it back in the cabinet. The house is quiet. Steady. Constant.

Three and a half months. The countdown doesn't care about Saturday mornings or toothbrushes or the way she traces my scar in the dark. The countdown just counts.

And somewhere in Denver, David Olson is offering something I can't.

Chapter 9

Macy

David Olson walks into the construction trailer at 10:14 on a Tuesday morning, and the room changes temperature.

He's wearing a charcoal suit that costs more than most of the vehicles in the parking lot. Italian shoes. A tie that probably has a pedigree. His silver hair is cut precisely, his posture speaks of boardrooms and conference calls and a confidence that comes from never once wondering whether he belongs somewhere. He belongs everywhere. That's the David Olson brand.