6 October 2026
“You brought the unfinished one,” Simon Vale said, and Maren had to remind herself that the pleasure in his voice was about the model.
He came around the table to take the cake carrier. Up close, his blue eyes were less intimidating than his company website, although the smile was going to be a problem. He had a small nick beside his mouth where he had shaved badly. She was grateful for it until she realized it was making her look at his mouth.
“You asked me to.”
“Yes. People don’t always believe me.”
“I couldn’t finish it on the train.”
He laughed, put the carrier down, and waited while she took off her coat. The meeting room overlooked the store’s stripped central floor. Two electricians were moving a ladder through what would become an archway. Beyond them, the front windows rose higher than her apartment ceiling, flooded with ordinary October light.
She had expected a receptionist, then an assistant, then another room in which to wait. Instead someone at the door had taken her name, checked it against a list, and pointed out a man in a blue shirt carrying two mugs. Simon had asked about the train as though she had come for lunch.
“Before we start,” she said, “the hours in my proposal are real. I can arrange evenings with notice, but on school days I need to leave by two thirty. I have a daughter.”
“How old?”
“Six. Nearly seven. She’s extremely clear about the distinction.”
“A useful quality in a consultant.”
“She’s expensive. Mostly in berries.”
He set one mug beside her, its handle turned toward her hand. “Our production lead will work out access with you if we get that far. I won’t pretend there aren’t deadlines. But I did read what you sent.”
She had prepared three versions of an explanation for why she couldn’t be endlessly available. None was needed. For a moment she had nothing ready to say.
“Good,” she said, then winced at the severity of it.
“I do occasionally read things before agreeing to them.”
“That puts you ahead of several of my clients.”
He pulled out the other chair. “Do I get names?”
“Not until after you’ve paid me.”
The mug contained the tea she had requested by email, with the milk separate. She took a careful sip and set it well away from her model.
He noticed that, too, and moved his own mug.
“Tell me where to touch.”
She unclipped the lid. A stall had come loose on the journey and lay on its side. The unfinished base looked distressingly pale against the black tabletop. Last night, under her kitchen lamp, it had seemed full of possibility. Here it looked like an object she should have apologized for carrying.
“The buildings lift off. The pegs locate them, but there isn’t one right arrangement.” She removed the little shop front, exposing the pencil grid beneath. “This was a market. It could be a theater. Or a street where somebody has very strong feelings about selling fish.”
“Why fish?”
“My daughter gave the princess a horse stall yesterday. I thought a fishmonger deserved a turn.”
Simon put his finger beneath the edge of the striped stall, then looked at her before lifting it. Such a small courtesy. Her shoulders loosened anyway.
He turned it around, examining the unpainted back.
“If I do this, it becomes a ticket office.”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t made a sign.”
“I could make twenty. I’d rather leave something for whoever plays with it.”
He lined the stall up with the shop, reconsidered, and moved it an inch. His hands were broad, with a rough patch near one thumb. She had expected immaculate hands. She had not expected to care.
“Does it trouble you?” she asked.
“What?”
“The pencil marks.”
“A bit.” He glanced at her and grinned. “You asked.”
She liked him rather more for admitting it.
For twenty minutes they moved her market. He wanted a coherent arrival point; she made him try coming in from the back. He created a tidy row of stalls and she resisted the impulse to scatter them immediately. A row was allowed to be someone’s choice. When he put the awning across the open square, she showed him how two stalls could support it without occupying the same spot.
“So you do care about where things go.”
“Of course. I just don’t think caring gives me the last word.”
She said it lightly. The sentence caught against an old memory all the same: Blake removing a crooked cake from a window she had built, then accepting an award for attention to detail.
Simon was studying the model, not her face.
“Come and see something,” he said.
She followed him down the temporary stairs to the selling floor. Nothing smelled of Christmas yet. It smelled of cut timber, dust and somebody’s toasted sandwich. Two half-built display plinths stood under covered lights. At the center, beneath a clear protective sheet, waited a miniature town.
Even covered, it was beautiful. Four deep-painted buildings surrounded a square paved in tiny gray rectangles. There were trees, balconies and a clock tower. She wanted to put her face close to the windows.
Simon peeled back the sheet.
“Town & Elsewhere. New range, existing modular connections. Houses split into floors, fronts exchange, doors relocate. It ought to be the thing you can keep making new.”
“And you want this in the window?”
“Some version of it. We’re launching nationally on the same day. The display has to make the product legible from the pavement as well as interesting inside.”
That was a real constraint. She liked real constraints better than a request to make something magical followed by complaints about the cost of magic.
He reached for the tower.
It didn’t move.
He tried again. The whole base rose half an inch.
Maren put a hand on the base before the lamps at its edge slid off.
Simon stared at the tower. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
“Is it meant to do that?”
“It is emphatically not meant to do that.”
She bent to look. Clear glue shone along the footprint of the bakery. Someone had secured every principal building in place. The display team had probably wanted it to survive transport. They had made an unusually convincing argument against the product’s chief selling point.
He rubbed the back of his neck.
“We photographed this yesterday. I said it looked splendid.”
“It does.”
“Don’t be kind.”
“I wasn’t. I was going to say it’s a splendid thing to look at.”
He looked at her for a second, and she wondered whether she had mistaken informality for permission. Then he started to laugh, under his breath at first, until one electrician glanced over.
“I asked for a demonstration people wouldn’t forget. This may qualify.”
“Could you ask whoever built it how it was fixed? Before you pull anything else.”
“Yes. Sensible. Deeply annoying.”
She walked around the table. The square was fixed, but a shallow tray at its edge contained loose sample pieces. She lifted a miniature red door with a rounded top and a brass-colored handle. The hinge pin fitted into a choice of tiny sockets.
“May I?”
“Please.”
She put it down sideways between two empty sockets in the sample rail. A door lying on its side became a small red barrier across the pavement.
“Floodgate,” she said.
He crouched slightly, accepting the new scale. “There isn’t any water.”
“Not yet.”
She took a folded scrap of blue packing tissue from the tray and pushed it toward the gate. Simon rescued a tiny wooden figure before the flood reached its feet.
“That man’s hat is extremely valuable.”
“He should have bought a boat.”
“He thought he was buying a house in a respectable neighborhood.”
“A common mistake.”
His laughter came out abruptly and warmly. She looked up into it. He was close enough that she could see the light catching the fine hairs on his forearm, and for a brief, unprofessional instant she forgot the table between them.
He moved the figure onto a roof. “There. Saved.”
“Now who’s going to rescue him?”
Simon considered the available pieces, chose a chimney and turned it upside down. “Emergency helicopter.”
“That is a chimney.”
“You’ve set a permissive standard.”
She laughed before she could moderate it. Her dimple pulled at one cheek; she felt it, the unmistakable shape her face made when she wasn’t being careful. Simon’s gaze paused on her. Then he put the chimney down gently.
She stepped back.
“The door’s useful because it does something,” she said. “I don’t need to tell anybody what story belongs to it.”
“But I need them to recognize a toy town rather than a bag of unrelated pieces.”
“Then make the first invitation clear. Leave the next move open.”
He looked at the glued street again. His smile faded into concentration, and she found that attractive too. This was becoming inconvenient in several directions.
“Can you show me?” he asked.
She had shown him her market, the door, the tissue flood. A familiar tightness gathered beneath her ribs. There was always another thing to show, another free illustration of the idea before anyone committed to the person who had it.
He must have seen something change.
“A paid trial,” he added. “Tomorrow morning. One section, one scale sketch, using what we already have. You tell us the materials and time. I want to see how you’d handle the window, and you ought to find out whether we’re people you can stand working with.”
“I would need Anika, my assistant, for two hours.”
“Put her on the estimate.”
“And I won’t design the whole installation for a trial fee.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to.”
“People sometimes ask without calling it asking.”
He nodded once, accepting the correction without a joke. “One section. We’ll write it down.”
She looked through the enormous windows. A woman on the pavement had stopped to wipe something from a boy’s cheek. The child had both palms against the glass, although there was almost nothing to see.
Maren pictured him on opening day, first outside looking in, then inside choosing a door. The desire to make it was physical, a pressure in her hands.
“All right,” she said.
The written trial brief arrived before she had put the carrier back together. It named her hours, Anika’s hours, the single section and the fee. Simon was called away to speak to the production lead, leaving Maren to zip her bag without an audience.
She checked her phone. A school notification, a delivery confirmation, and nothing from Blake.
She hated that she had checked in this room. Hated the small disappointed drop inside her when no reply appeared. She didn’t want him to want her. That distinction had taken years to become simple. But some damaged part of her still wanted him to find a message from her impossible to ignore.
Outside the room, Simon bent over the sample tray, listening to a woman with a tablet. He didn’t seem diminished by her brisk account of the glue. He looked mildly embarrassed and very interested.
When he saw Maren, he came to the doorway.
“We’ll have the pieces loose tomorrow,” he said. “That seems a promising start.”
“You could put that on the boxes.”
“Apparently our marketing team prefers more ambitious claims.”
He held the door while she lifted the carrier. “Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for the tea.”
“Only the tea?”
She looked at him. His expression was open, but there was a small, unmistakable challenge in it. He knew he was flirting. So did she.
“I’ll let you know about the rest,” she said.
On the pavement she had to stop and shift the carrier to her other hand. It wasn’t particularly heavy. Her pulse was behaving as though she had carried it up six flights.
The phone vibrated in her coat pocket.
Blake had replied.
Friday. Eleven. Tell me where.
She read the five words twice. There was no greeting, no question about why she wanted to speak. He had replied; she had to decide the next thing.
Through the glass Simon was still by the sample table. He lifted the red door, turned it sideways, and showed the production lead the new place it could go.
Maren put her phone away and held the cake carrier with both hands.