She smiles—the real one, not the service smile I've seen her deploy when she's being professionally warm—and we go in.
The shop has the specific smell of electronics retail: plastic casings and screen cleaner and the faint ozone smell of devices running and being demo'd, layered over the older building's stone-and-wood base that the fitout hasn't fully replaced. Clean lines, well-lit, organized with the precision of a small operation that can't afford to lose anything in stock management. The assistant behind the counter—young, Beta, the particular alertness of someone working Monday afternoon and choosing to be engaged rather than going through the motions—looks up.
"Just browsing," I say, "but interested in what you have on phones. Any deals worth looking at?"
"New arrivals just came in last week." He comes around to the display wall. "And we have a few phone-laptop combinations that run considerably better value than buying them separately, if you're looking for a setup rather than just a device."
Mila is already somewhere.
I find her two stands down the display wall, and the expression on her face tells me before I've seen what she's looking at. Eyes wide, genuinely—the specific brightness that isn't performed enthusiasm but actual, caught-off-guard delight, the expression of someone who has found the exact thing before they finished looking for it.
I come to stand beside her.
The phone is a shade of teal that sits somewhere between seafoam and the actual color of the ocean on a clear day—not blue, not green, genuinely its own point on the spectrum. Compact, with the physical keyboard below the screen that I haven't seen on a consumer device in years, the kind ofdesign that disappeared when touchscreens took over and left behind a specific population of people who genuinely mourned tactile keys and never said so. The brand is unfamiliar to me: iUniHertz, the display card reads, with a subheading that says something about BlackBerry DNA meeting modern architecture.
From a flip phone with no camera to this in one night.
She deserves the upgrade.
"What is this model?" I ask the assistant.
"The Titan Pocket Pro. It's their latest—physical QWERTY keyboard, touchscreen above it, full smartphone operating system. Battery life is exceptional. It's particularly popular with people who do a lot of correspondence, business applications, that kind of use." He picks up the display unit and turns it over in his hands. "We have it paired with a matching laptop—same teal colorway, same ecosystem, share files and contacts seamlessly. The combination is two hundred more than the phone alone, but given what laptops run now, it's one of the better deals we've seen come through."
I look at Mila.
She's holding the display model now, turning it the way people turn things when they're trying to talk themselves out of wanting them—cataloguing flaws, running reasons, building the case against. Her thumb finds the keyboard and presses a few keys with the instinctive, exploratory press of someone testing whether the tactile feedback is what they're hoping for. Her face when it is.
"Do you like it?"
She looks up at me.
The worried expression arrives on cue—the specific, practiced look of a woman calculating whether want constitutes need and whether need is something she's permitted to act on. "I—yes. I do. But the laptop might be—I don't necessarily—" Shepauses. Tries again. "I don't know if Oakridge has an internet café. I used one in the city when I needed access for—" She stops.
"For what?"
A beat.
"Research. When I was going to—when I had plans. For the bar. There's a lot of licensing information and supplier background and market data that I was—" She trails off, and the specific expression that replaces the sentence is the one I've seen once before: the way she said the words Lucky Clover Lounge at the hotel, with that careful, slightly too-gentle quality of something she's been handling for a long time.
"Have those plans changed?" I ask.
She considers it. Genuinely considers it rather than dismissing immediately, which tells me the question reached somewhere past the deflection layer.
"No," she says. Quietly. "No, I still want it. I just haven't had the—" She looks at the phone again. "I definitely need a phone. The laptop might be?—"
The assistant is watching this exchange with an expression I recognize because I've seen it in Danny's bar and the dress shop and every service context where someone who works with the public long enough starts reading the actual situation rather than just the transaction. His face has the specific softness of a person who has seen versions of this circumstance with some regularity and has feelings about it.
I pull out the black Amex.
It's on Rowan's pack account, which means it is technically Rowan's card in the sense that all pack finances are technically Rowan's province and also technically belong to all of us because that's how the arrangement has worked for eight years. Rowan will have opinions about its use that he will deliver in the form of two sentences and then move on, because Rowan's actualrelationship to money is that it exists to solve problems and she is currently a problem that requires solving.
"Ring it up," I say. "Both."
The assistant's face does the thing.
Mila's face does the other thing.
"Wait—it's too much—I can—" She's already reaching for a calculation that I can see forming behind her eyes, the ledger-and-repayment structure she defaults to.
