8 October 2026
At seven in the evening, Simon Vale’s head floated over a taxi.
Maren had been trying to judge a sight line from across the street. The store lights behind him threw his reflection onto the angled window so that his broad face hovered, enormous and solemn, above the traffic. He raised a hand to check whether she could see him. A cyclist passed straight through his wrist.
She laughed so hard she missed the next light.
He saw her laughing and looked behind him for the cause. That made it worse. By the time she crossed, wiping the corner of one eye, he had worked it out and was attempting to lower his reflected hand onto the roof of a parked car.
“Very childish,” he said when she came inside.
“It’s a toy shop.”
“I’m told.”
“You could run that as the entire Christmas window. Giant founder menaces Manhattan.”
“Nobody’s ever paid me to look menacing.”
“Do you want an honest answer to that?”
He grinned and opened the inner door. She stepped past him, aware of his hand against the glass above her shoulder. He smelled of clean wool and the coffee he had been drinking. She’d been cold outside; the sudden warmth inside traveled inconveniently farther than it should.
She had arranged this survey because she needed to see the reflection after dark, when the shop would compete with itself. The production lead couldn’t come until tomorrow, and Simon had offered access. It was work, approved hours, nothing she had to call by another name.
Her school-neighbor sitter was at the apartment with Willa. Maren had booked the evening before accepting, paid the additional hour they might need, and left pasta in the fridge. She knew exactly when she needed to go. She liked the knowledge that she could still be here, laughing at something stupid with an attractive man, without any part of home being in danger.
Simon held up a packet of biscuits.
“Provisioning.”
“You remembered milk but forgot a proper dinner?”
“I’ve got a dinner. Later.”
Of course he had a dinner. Somewhere with people whose Thursday evenings began after hers ended. She put her notebook down and took a biscuit she didn’t want quite as casually as she’d intended.
They moved a portable lamp from one side of the unfinished plinth to the other. Simon carried; Maren directed. At the third position he asked why she was putting all the weight at the left-hand side. She explained the pavement approach. He came outside with her to see it rather than disagreeing from inside.
Standing shoulder to shoulder before the window, she could almost imagine the lit town. A child would catch the gold in the upper windows first. An adult might stop for the ridiculous detail on the bakery roof. Then they would discover the lower work inside.
“Here,” Simon said, touching the glass. “This is where the first line disappears.”
She shifted half a pace. He was right. From his height, a reflection swallowed one of her reference marks. Her first impulse was to tell him most people weren’t his height, which was both untrue and unhelpful.
“I’ll raise it,” she said.
“Or lower it. The children are presumably quite short.”
“A problem we’re hoping they grow out of.”
He laughed and looked down at her, his face ordinary-sized again. She wanted, with startling clarity, to put her cold hand into the warm space at the bend of his elbow.
She tucked it into her coat pocket instead.
Inside, he helped her lay the first large paper plan against the wall. She had signed it before coming. His fingers pinned one corner while she taped the other, and his sleeve brushed her cheek. The sensation was nothing. She knew better than to make something of a sleeve. Yet when she stepped away she was conscious of her own skin, of the bare place just below her ear.
“You have a good eye,” he said.
“I hope so. You hired it.”
“It’s attached to the rest of you, presumably.”
She glanced at him. He had become very interested in the tape dispenser.
It was possible Simon Vale was not as practiced at this as his smile suggested. That possibility was almost worse.
They worked in easy quiet for several minutes. Maren wrote three changes onto the plan. She would send them in the morning, when she could check that the new height still worked with the entrance angle. No major invention tonight. The simple act of standing in a place was giving her more useful information than another hour of drawing would have done.
Then Simon picked up the launch schedule somebody had left on a chair.
“I’ve finally met our host on a call,” he said. “Blake Denham. He says he knows you.”
Maren pulled the tape too hard. It split crookedly across her thumb.
“Did he?”
“Only that you worked together years ago. I said you’d got the installation.”
She pressed the torn strip onto the paper. Her hand had gone clumsy. Blake knew where she was working now. That shouldn’t matter. Tomorrow at eleven she would tell him the thing she should have told him seven years ago. He could know every employer she’d had in the meantime and it wouldn’t change the sentence.
“We did,” she said.
Simon set the schedule down.
“You don’t have to sound enthusiastic about him. People can be good at a job and dreadful to work with.”
“He wasn’t always dreadful.”
She heard what she’d said. She didn’t want to soften him for a stranger. She didn’t want to make a performance of his faults either. The room felt too bright, every unfinished object suddenly exposed.
Simon waited.
Maren peeled the unused tape from her thumb.
“He’s Willa’s father.”
His expression changed. Not dramatically. His gaze settled on her as though a conversation he had thought he understood had acquired another floor beneath it.
“Your daughter’s name is Willa?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know you’re here because—”
“He doesn’t know about her.”
The words fell into the empty shop. She had told friends pieces of this history, never casually, never without watching them decide what sort of woman she was. She hadn’t meant to tell Simon tonight. That wasn’t quite true. She hadn’t meant to have to.
He didn’t move toward her.
“She’s six,” he said.
“She’ll be seven in November.”
He looked down at the torn strip of tape in her hand and then back at her.
“Are you going to tell him?”
“Tomorrow. I’d arranged it before I knew about this commission. I sent him a message on Monday.”
Simon put his hands in his pockets. Something guarded had entered his posture, and it hurt more than she had any right to expect.
“Did you try before?”
“No.”
Her throat tightened. She would have preferred a question she could answer with a difficult delivery, an incorrect address, some obstacle she had been too poor or too wounded to overcome. She had spent years furnishing that imaginary version of her history. It had never become true.
“I knew how to reach him. After he asked for a divorce, he told me not to contact him about personal things. I found out I was pregnant three weeks after he left. I didn’t tell him.”
“Did he know you were pregnant when he said that?”
“No.”
Simon let out a breath.
She looked away first. The reflected giant had been funny five minutes ago. She wanted five minutes ago so fiercely that she almost gathered her things and left him with the present one.
“I was angry,” she said. “And frightened. Then it had been a month, and three months, and she was here. There isn’t a point where it becomes a better explanation.”
He was silent long enough that she could hear the timer click in a lighting circuit at the far wall.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said at last.
“You don’t have to say anything helpful.”
“That may be fortunate.”
She laughed once, without amusement. Her eyes burned. She hated that; hated the possibility that tears might make him feel he had to make her comfortable when she was the person who had done it.
He pulled out the chair beside the plan, but he didn’t guide her toward it. She sat because her knees wanted her to.
“Does Willa know?”
“She knows I haven’t told him. She asked me again last week. I said I would before her birthday.”
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“Tomorrow.”
“All right.”
She looked up sharply. “It isn’t all right.”
“No. I meant I’ve heard you.” He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “I haven’t got a better answer waiting in my pocket.”
That was kinder than she had expected and less comforting than an easy reassurance would have been. She could bear it. She put both feet flat on the floor.
“I need you not to speak to him about it.”
“I won’t.”
“Or move his booking.”
“Maren.” His voice was quiet. “I haven’t offered to.”
She nodded, looking at her notebook. The practical answers had queued up automatically, things to prevent, work to separate, an event to protect. He was looking at a woman and a child and a man who didn’t know his own life. She had started listing tasks.
“Sorry.”
“You can ask for what you need. I can also tell you when you’re answering a question I didn’t ask.”
She almost smiled. It didn’t quite arrive.
“Do you want to go home?”
The sitter. Willa. The photograph waiting in her bag, one small knee with a leaf on it. Maren glanced at the clock. There was still time before she had promised to leave.
“I want to finish the survey.”
Simon looked at her for a moment. “Then tell me where the light goes.”
They finished without forcing their earlier ease to return. He carried the lamp, she marked the height, and neither mistook the work for an answer to anything else. When they were done, he photographed the marks for the production lead and she rolled up her spare drawing.
At the door he asked how she was getting home.
“Subway.”
“There’s a car downstairs. I could have it take you.”
She opened her mouth to refuse. He held up one hand, smiling faintly.
“It’s raining, which neither of us noticed. You may still prefer the train.”
Through the glass she saw the bright stippling of rain in a taxi’s headlights. Her bag contained paper, her coat was not waterproof, and she was tired enough that pride seemed an expensive way to travel.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’d like that.”
He spoke briefly to the driver and gave Maren the door. She supplied her address herself. Simon remained on the pavement, rain darkening the shoulders of his coat.
“Good night, Maren.”
She looked up at him. “Have a good dinner.”
“I may be a little dull company.”
The honesty caught her. He hadn’t made her into an inconvenience, but he wasn’t pretending the conversation had vanished either.
“I’m sorry to have spoiled your evening.”
“You haven’t.” He paused. “I can be troubled by something you told me and still be glad I spent the evening with you.”
Her hand tightened around the bag strap.
“Good night,” she said before he could see too much of her face.
In the car, leather warm beneath her palms, she watched Manhattan slide past. An umbrella turned inside out. A man carried a small dog under his jacket. A woman at a restaurant window laughed with her head tipped back, entirely inside the pleasure of her own evening.
Maren wanted that. Not the restaurant, not even the extraordinary car. She wanted to sit opposite a man and forget, for a little while, to measure herself against the worst thing she’d done.
She wanted Simon to touch the bare place below her ear.
The thought was so unwelcome and so alive that she pressed her fingers there herself, then let her hand fall.
At home Willa was asleep with the wooden-spoon princess beneath one arm. The sitter reported that the pasta had been eaten, the toothbrushing contested and the second story negotiated without success. Maren paid her and thanked her. After the door closed she stood in the quiet kitchen without turning on the bright light.
She took the photograph from her notebook. In the dimness Willa’s outflung arms looked almost weightless.
Tomorrow, Blake would see the child in the picture. Tonight, her mother had to do the small things that still belonged to tonight.
Maren put the photograph beside her keys, washed the pasta pan and set the alarm for morning.