Page 3 of Working For Her Second Chance

"Correct."

"In a town where half the poles are original install from the eighties and the soil is forty percent shale."

My jaw tightens. "The engineering firm accounted for soil composition in the conduit specs."

"Did they account for the fact that the main feed on Elm crosses under the old mill foundation? Because if they're planning to trench through that, they're going to hit rebar and concrete for thirty yards, and your eight-week timeline becomes twelve."

The trailer goes quiet. Hank Mullins takes a slow sip of coffee like he's watching a tennis match from comfortable seats.

He's not wrong. That's the worst part. He's not wrong, and he knows it, and the way he holds my gaze while he says it—steady, certain, not backing down—is exactly the way he looked at me across that bonfire when he laid his whole heart on the ground and I stepped over it.

"If there are subsurface obstructions the survey missed, we'll adapt the routing," I say, keeping my voice level.

"Might want to adapt the timeline while you're at it."

"The timeline is what the client approved."

"The ground doesn't care what the client approved."

Somewhere in the back, Hank murmurs, "That's going on a bumper sticker."

Lila clears her throat. "Maybe we can set up a separate meeting to walk the specific routing concerns? River, you've got the institutional knowledge. Macy, you've got the engineering."

River nods. One dip of his chin. He picks up his tool belt and pushes through the trailer door without looking back.

The meeting continues. I walk through the rest of the presentation with a smile that's all professional and zero percent real. When it's over, I sit behind the wheel in the gravel lot with the engine off and my hands on my thighs.

They're shaking.

I open the master spreadsheet. Scroll to the contingency tab. Add a new row at the bottom.

Row 47: Unexpected variable. River Dawson. Mitigation strategy: TBD.

TBD. The professional abbreviation for I'm in trouble and I don't have a plan for it yet.

The power lines stretch along the road toward the ridge. On the far side of the staging area, a white co-op truck is parked and a figure stands below one of the poles—too far to see clearly, but I know who it is the way you know which wire is live without testing it.

He doesn't wave. Just lifts two fingers off his belt—the Forge Creek salute, I see you, I know you—and turns back to his work.

The rearview mirror holds the image longer than it should. The mountains. The power lines. The man who stayed.

Six months. That's the plan. Clean, professional, in and out.

The plan does not account for the fact that my hands are still shaking, or that I can still feel the ghost of a scar under my fingertip from a morning at Kincaid's when I touched a boy's hand across a counter and the world shifted on its axis and I pretended it didn't.

Version eight is going to need a whole new section.

Chapter 2

River

Five a.m. comes the way it always does. No alarm. Just the shift in light behind my eyelids and the click of Hitch’s nails across the hardwood toward the kitchen door. The dog has never needed a clock. Neither have I. Input: sunrise. Output: vertical.

Coffee first. The machine is older than most of my friendships—a drip pot my father bought at the hardware store the year he built this house—and it sounds like a diesel engine turning over on a cold morning. While it brews, the screen door bangs behind me Wooden planks my grandfather laid. Railing my father replaced twice. View of the eastern ridge that hasn’t changed since the Dawsons first looked at it and decided this was where they’d stay.

Hitch settles at my feet with a sigh that contains his full opinion of the human species and its sluggish morning habits. He’s twelve now, gray around the muzzle, slower on the stairs. Still the best judge of character in the county.

The coffee is black. The ridge is turning pink. The power lines run east along the road toward town, wooden poles spaced at regulation intervals, crossarms dark against the brightening sky. My father’s line. Same route he drove every morning in his co-optruck, checking for storm damage, clearing branches, replacing hardware that the weather chewed through. Some of those poles still have his small yellow tags with his lineman number.