It was just where you had to start.
NADIA
The Selective's first standalone marketing event was supposed to be straightforward.
Kelly had set it up three weeks ago, back when my world had a different shape. A Friday evening at the church hall, a showcase. Local vendors, one long table per business, two hours to let the public put faces to names. My contribution: set out the sample trays, talk to people, hand out cards.
I could do this in my sleep.
I stood at my table and told myself that for the fourth time.
Kelly appeared at my elbow with two cups of coffee, her expression telling me she'd noticed something she wouldn't mention unless asked. She handed one over and looked at the room, which was filling.
"Cherie's got a good crowd," she said.
"She does." I looked toward the bridal salon display, where Cherie was showing fabric swatches to a woman who had the glow of the newly engaged. The room had that early-evening energy I usually liked, the hum of people and conversation, everything getting started.
I usually liked it.
"Daisy sold two custom pieces to the same couple," Kelly said. "Inside of twenty minutes."
"Good."
"How are your samples going?"
I looked at the trays. The mushroom arancini were almost gone. The bruschetta hadn't moved as fast, but that happened. I'd need to restock from the container in the car once this wave of visitors thinned.
It was all fine. Everything was fine. Except that somewhere between plating the samples at the commercial kitchen at four-thirty and loading them into the van an hour later, I'd reached for my phone out of habit to text someone. And then had not.
"Samples are good," I said.
Kelly was quiet in that way she had. Then: "You don't have to stay the whole two hours. I can cover your table if?—"
"I'm fine, Kelly."
"I didn't say you weren't."
A couple approached the table. I smiled and launched into the introduction I'd given fifteen times that day, the one about Coogan's Catering and the collective and the type of corporate accounts I was building toward. The words came out the right way in the right order, professional and warm, exactly as practiced.
The couple took cards and moved on.
Kelly drifted tactfully to Daisy's table. I stacked another tray and tried to remember when I'd last had a conversation that felt like something rather than a series of correct responses delivered on schedule.
Three weeks. I knew the number precisely because I'd been tracking it the way I tracked everything. A fact recorded and filed and not looked at too often, because looking at it helped nothing.
I was good at that. Ten years in the military had made me good at compartmentalizing the things that helped nothing. Right now, it had a hollow ring.
I'd put a name to what I felt for him weeks ago, out loud, in the dark of his apartment, asking for nothing back. The name hadn't expired when he left. That was the inconvenient part.
Across the room, Cherie laughed at something the engaged woman said, the sound lifting the mood. I thought about the collective lunch at the church hall, the photo Kelly had taken at the kitchen doorway. I'd thought about it the night I'd unpinned it. I hadn't thought about what I'd done with it after that, and that was intentional.
I'd been wrong before. I'd trusted my read of a situation and come home from my last deployment to find the life I'd planned had quietly reorganized itself without me. I'd recovered from that.
I restocked the bruschetta and straightened a cardholder that didn't need straightening.
The door at the far end of the hall opened. A group came in, four or five people, but he wasn't with them.
I turned back to my table.
