CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The booth walkthrough had been Freddie's suggestion. Not because the outline plan wasn't sufficient. Sufficient was not the same as right, and there was a quality of problem that only revealed itself when you stood in the actual space and walked the actual distance between the actual points. He had learned this in the military, and it applied here.
Wren had agreed without needing convincing, which was one of the things he had come to appreciate about working with her. She understood the difference between the plan and the execution, and she didn't defend the plan when the execution was the point.
They had started at the north end at ten o'clock, clipboards in hand. Hers with color-coded tabs. They worked their way down through the booth footprints, adjusting placements by inches, having the small, precise arguments that came from two people who both cared about the same thing and had different intuitions about how to achieve it.
The main street pavement had been brushed clear of the overnight leaves by the council crew. The planters at intervals along the street had been replaced with autumnal arrangements:mums and ornamental cabbage and some trailing dark ivy. Someone had already hung the market bunting between the lamp-posts, deep red and amber and gold, which moved in the light wind like something celebrating.
Freddie noted all of this and found it satisfying, because the satisfaction was partly about the market and partly about who he was standing next to.
"The cable route for the Northern Lights goes under this section," Wren said, crouching at the corner of booth footprint seven, pointing at the cable channel they'd had the council mark out. "Which means if the craft booth goes here, Mrs. Patel's bunting overhangs the run, and if it rains?—"
"The run is weatherproofed," Freddie said.
"To a point. You saw the spec."
He had seen the spec. She was technically correct. "Move the craft booth six feet north."
"Then the mulled cider access becomes?—"
"Workable. Six feet. Try it." He pulled out the site map and traced the adjustment. "If you move the cider to face east instead of south, it opens the whole corner."
She took the clipboard from him without asking. Her fingers brushed his, and she heard her breath intake. He watched her read it—the quick, focused movement of her eyes, the slight compression of her mouth when she found the thing she was looking for. She handed it back, brushing his fingers again. This time it was Freddie's breath that caught.
"Fine," she said. "You're right."
"I know."
She looked up at him with an expression that was exasperation performing as amusement, or possibly the other way around. Then her expression shifted into something different; the amusement still there but underneath it theother thing, the thing that had been underneath most of their interactions for the last couple of days and was not decreasing.
"So you're telling me you'd already solved this and let me work through it, anyway."
"I thought you might find a better solution."
She laughed; the real one, the unguarded one. Her hand went briefly to her mouth as though she might catch it before it escaped. Freddie watched it and felt the warmth of it move through him the way warmth from a fire moved.
She shook her head, but the smile hadn't left. She turned to mark the stage position adjustment on her clipboard. He moved to indicate the northern limit of the footprint. Their hands arrived at the same point on the measuring tape simultaneously.
He did not move his hand. Neither did she.
The contact was brief. Her fingers against his, cold from the morning air, the particular warmth of skin against skin. Both of them looked at the measuring tape and then, at the same time, at each other.
The main street was quiet around them. The bunting moved in the wind. Just a few days out, the market was real enough to feel, the shape of it emerging from the cobblestones and the chalk marks and the weeks of arguments about booth placement, and he was standing in the middle of the thing they'd built and she was looking at him with the expression that did not have a category and he was?—
"Hey, Gallagher."
Freddie straightened. The moment released.
Dylan Banks was crossing the street toward them from the direction of the car park with Maggie a half-step behind him. Dylan had the build of a man who had spent real time outdoors. His expression was that of a man on a mission.
Maggie was grinning with the unguarded warmth of someone who had also decided something but felt considerably better about it.
"Dylan," Wren said, with the specific surprise of a woman who had not expected her brother on the main street on a Tuesday morning. "What are you?—"
"I'm on a lunch date with my wife." Dylan was looking at Freddie. Not hostilely. But looking in the way people looked when they were making an assessment.
"We were just heading to the diner," Maggie said pleasantly, as though she had not noticed or was choosing not to notice anything about the quality of the moment they'd interrupted. She came and stood next to Wren and linked her arm through hers with the ease of a woman who had done this a hundred times. "Show me the booth layout?"
