Page 9 of Working For Her Second Chance

Six months. The plan is the plan.

The plan has never felt less like a plan and more like a prayer I'm not sure I believe in anymore.

Chapter 4

River

Sixty feet up, the world makes sense.

The wind pulls at my sleeves and the harness bites into my thighs and the crossarm under my boots is solid Douglas fir, bolted to a pole that's been standing since before I was born. Up here, the rules are simple: respect the voltage, trust your gear, keep your hands where they belong. No ambiguity. No history. Just physics and twelve thousand volts running through the wire six inches from my gloves.

Clear. Binary. The circuit is safe or it kills you. My father appreciated that kind of honesty. So do I.

Main Street stretches below in a grid of rooftops and scaffolding and the anthill rhythm of a construction site finding its stride. Dump trucks. Bobcats. A grading crew shaping the lot where the old laundromat used to be. And Macy, in her hard hat and canvas jacket, walking the site with a clipboard, crews stepping aside without being asked.

She's been here ten days. Ten days of revised timelines and routing meetings and standing close enough to catch the smell of her shampoo while we argue about transformer load calculations. Ten days of pretending the space between us isprofessional when every nerve in my body has filed a formal complaint.

The crossarm I'm replacing is cracked along the grain—lightning strike, probably, that nobody flagged on the last inspection. Standard repair. Unbolt the old one, muscle the new arm up on the gin pole, set the hardware, retie the conductors. Done this a thousand times. My hands know the sequence the way they know the callus map of my own grip—by heart, without looking.

The scar she traced across the counter at Kincaid's. The one she mapped with her fingertip that Thursday night in my bedroom, after, when the lamp made everything golden and her breathing was still uneven against my chest.

Focus. Sixty feet up. Twelve thousand volts. The crossarm doesn't care about the past. Neither does gravity.

A gust catches the conductor I just retied. The wire jumps. The arc comes out of nowhere—a blue-white crack that splits the air six inches from my glove, close enough that the heat prickles through the rubber and the ozone hits my nose like a chemical slap.

My body reacts before my brain does. Weight back. Hands clear. Feet solid on the pegs. The wire settles. The arc dies. The hum returns to normal.

Standard procedure. The body knows. Training takes over and the hands move and you don't die.

My father’s hands didn’t move fast enough. February, years ago. Same kind of repair—crossarm, cracked grain, standard job he'd done ten thousand times. The arc that killed him was bigger than this one. Hotter. The report said the contact lasted less than a second. A second is enough. A second is everything.

I was eighteen. Six months into my apprenticeship. They called me on the radio and I drove to the site and his truck was there but he wasn't. For one stupid second I thought he'dclimbed down, was fine, was about to step around the pole with that steady half-smile and say something about the weather.

He didn't step around the pole.

"River!"

Macy's voice carries with a clarity that cuts through sixty feet of air and a decade of silence. The sound of my name in her mouth—panicked, raw, stripped of every professional syllable she's been building like a seawall for ten days.

She knows. She knows how my father died. She knows what an arc flash means on a power line. She held that knowledge across the counter at Kincaid's the summer she was eighteen, when I told her the real version—not the county paper version, not the co-op memorial version, the version where I drove to the site and his truck was there and he wasn't.

She's standing at the base of the pole. Hard hat tilted back, body rigid, clipboard forgotten at her side. The crew has gone still—the arc was loud enough to freeze everyone within earshot. But Macy isn't looking at the crew. She's looking up at me with an expression that has cracked through every layer of distance she's maintained since she walked into that construction trailer.

Fear. The kind that comes from a place you thought you'd sealed off.

She's not just seeing me up here. She's seeing my father. She's doing the math I did my first year on the poles—the truck, the pole, the silence where a person should be.

"I'm good," I call down. Voice steady, because steady is what the job requires. What the Dawson men do. Stand still. Sound sure. Even when the voltage is still singing in the wire and the ozone is sharp in my throat and the memory of my father's empty truck is sitting in my chest like a stone. "Conductor jumped. It happens."

She doesn't move. Her hands hang at her sides, clenched into fists, and even from sixty feet up I can see the effort it takes her to unlock her jaw.

I take my time climbing down. Check the hardware. Log the arc event on my radio. Give dispatch the readings. Every step deliberate, because up here is where the rules are clear and down there is where Macy Sinclair is standing with years' worth of something she's trying very hard not to show.

My boots hit dirt. She's three feet away.

"You good?" Her voice is level. Controlled. The mask is back, but it's on crooked—like a picture frame knocked sideways by a door slamming.

"Happens all the time."