17 October 2026
The little red door opened halfway and refused to go farther.
Simon crouched in front of it. Maren, sitting on the floor with her legs folded beneath her, could see him trying not to apply force.
“It’s listening,” she said.
“To what?”
“Your opinion of it.”
“My opinion is currently unfavorable.”
The prototype occupied a low worktable between them. Beyond it, the paper version of their town climbed the window in layers of lit and unlit shapes. The production team had installed the main framework that afternoon. Maren needed tonight’s quiet to check the effect from the pavement, with the mock fronts in place, before the next fabrication order.
Simon had stayed to help because the door was his addition to the test. He wanted one small movement that could be seen from outside, a door opening and a light appearing beyond it. Maren liked the invitation. She didn’t like the bracket he’d drawn for it, which she had said in three increasingly polite ways.
Now it was stuck exactly where she’d feared it might stick, and he was being sufficiently attractive about the failure that she couldn’t enjoy being right properly.
“Don’t say it,” he said.
“I haven’t spoken.”
“You’ve developed an expression.”
“I’m concentrating.”
He glanced at her, and her concentration changed direction.
They had not mentioned the kiss on his cheek. They had emailed about materials, spoken on the phone about the build, and greeted each other at seven as if neither remembered the hotel stairs. Now it was nearly ten, the rest of the store was empty except for security at the entrance, and Simon had rolled his sleeves above his elbows.
Maren remembered his cheek with inconvenient precision.
He sat back on his heels. “Right. We take it out.”
“The bracket.”
“Yes, the bracket. I haven’t yet proposed demolishing the window.”
“I’m making a note of the date.”
He handed her the small driver. “You first, then.”
She loosened the attachment while he supported the door. Their fingers met under the tiny arch. Neither pulled away quickly enough for it to be entirely about room to work.
“Sorry,” he said.
“You don’t have to apologize. I’m in the way too.”
He looked at her. The space beneath the arch was abruptly insufficient for either of them to think sensibly.
Maren removed the bracket and set it on the table. Simon placed the red door beside it with unnecessary care. The paint had a slightly uneven edge, visible only up close. She had liked it when she first took it from the sample tray. It looked handled, as though a tiny person had opened it with groceries in one arm.
Simon examined the metal piece.
“I measured from the wrong edge.”
She leaned over. “Which one?”
He showed her.
She pressed her lips together.
“I told you not to say it.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“That’s worse.”
She laughed. He shut his eyes briefly and laughed too, surrendering his dignity with a visible effort that made her want to touch him more than competence would have done.
“You could have given it to somebody downstairs,” she said.
“And missed this?”
“You have people who could make a new one.”
“Tomorrow. Tonight I have a person who could have made a better first one.”
“You?”
He pointed at himself, looking suitably chastened.
They tried a spare piece from the test supplies. Too wide. Another was the right width and wrong length. Simon fetched a file and began doing something laborious enough to occupy his hands while Maren checked the lights.
She liked the quiet sound of him working. Liked that she could move around the room without keeping up a bright conversation for him. He didn’t become less attractive when she stopped looking directly at him. This seemed unfair.
Her phone showed a message from the sitter: Willa asleep, all well. Maren sent thanks and put the phone aside. They had agreed on one o’clock. There was time to finish what she had come to finish. No need to steal an hour and call it necessary.
At the front door Simon pulled on his jacket and came outside to hold the plan while she checked the window. The street was busy with people going somewhere more obviously enjoyable. A couple passed arm in arm, laughing over a phone. Maren looked at the reflection of herself beside Simon and wondered how they appeared from behind.
Two people at work. One carrying a plan, both staring into a shop. Nobody could mistake it for a date.
She was suddenly tired of needing to tell herself that.
“The upper light’s too bright,” she said.
“I agree.”
“The lower one is right.”
“I agree with that too.”
She looked at him. “You can have another opinion.”
“I was saving a terrible one about the snow.”
“Let’s go inside before you use it.”
At eleven they ate sandwiches from the deli Simon had called before it shut. Maren sat on a chair with one shoe hooked on its lower rail. Simon sat opposite, holding a paper plate on his knees because they had covered every table with things nobody wanted mayonnaise on.
“You’ve got mustard,” she said.
He looked down at his shirt.
“No. Here.” She pointed to the corner of her own mouth.
He wiped the wrong side.
“Other side.”
He made another attempt and looked at her hopefully.
She reached with her napkin, stopped, and offered it to him instead.
His eyes stayed on her face while he took it.
“Thank you.”
The words sounded different at this hour. Everything did: the thin rustle of the sandwich paper, the click of the lighting control, the ordinary breath he took before speaking again.
“Did you get home all right on Thursday?”
“Yes. On time, with both shoes.”
“An ambitious evening.”
She smiled. “I had a very good time.”
“You said.”
“You seem to be asking again.”
He rubbed one eyebrow. It was such an unguarded movement that she almost took pity on him.
“I suppose I am.”
“Did you?”
“Have a good time? Yes. Although I spent an unreasonable amount of it at the wrong end of a table.”
She looked down at her sandwich, smiling despite herself.
“You chose the seating.”
“An error I am reviewing.”
They ate in a silence that felt fuller than the conversation. She could ask him something personal. She could ask about the people waiting in his private life, if there were any, or how often he worked this late. Instead she said the thing she most wanted to know.
“Is this what you do when something won’t work?”
He glanced toward the bracket. “Stay until it does? Sometimes.”
“Do you ever go home and let it wait?”
“I’ve become better at it. People who work for me would say not good enough.”
“I’m not always good at it either.”
He nodded. “I noticed when you described the market as almost finished.”
“That was a reasonable description.”
“It had a shop and an extraordinary amount of air.”
She laughed. He grinned, plainly pleased he’d caused it.
“I should have brought a finished thing.”
“Why?”
“Because now you know what the back of it looks like.”
“Maren, I own a toy company. I know what things look like before somebody puts the photograph on the box.”
He didn’t make the sentence into advice. He finished his sandwich, folded the paper over the plate and carried both to the bin. She watched him and felt a complicated tenderness that had very little to do with her market.
He returned to the worktable. She followed after a moment, less interested in the bracket than she’d been before dinner.
It still didn’t fit.
Simon set it down, looked at the clock and shook his head.
“Tomorrow’s problem.”
“The production lead can have it measured properly on Monday.”
“With an extremely explicit note identifying whose fault it was.”
“I wouldn’t write that.”
“Then I shall. There must be some benefit to employing me.”
“Do you come with the window?”
He looked at her. “I rather hope so.”
The joke faded between them. Maren heard the store’s ventilation start above the ceiling and stop again. She had never been so aware of how little stood between a conversation and a touch.
She picked up the door to put it in its tray. He reached for it at the same time. This time, when their fingers met, neither offered an apology.
He was standing close enough that she would only need to lift her face. He glanced down at her mouth, then back to her eyes. The restraint in that second glance made heat gather low in her belly.
She leaned toward him before she had decided to.
Then she saw the signed drawing beyond his shoulder, her name in the corner, and stopped.
Simon went still.
For one miserable beat she thought he would step back and restore the safe language of work. She wanted him badly enough that the possibility hurt. She set the little red door down so she wouldn’t drop it.
“I don’t want to do this because it’s past midnight and we’ve got a deadline,” she said.
“We don’t have to do anything.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
He waited, his hands resting on the table on either side of the tray. She could see the effort it cost him not to turn her hesitation into a convenient answer.
“I would prefer an invitation,” she said. “One that doesn’t involve a delivery schedule.”
His eyes warmed. “I can do that.”
“I thought you might.”
He laughed once, very quietly.
She was smiling too now, and felt exposed by it in a way she hadn’t felt in the hotel dress. There was no plausible reason left to call this a misunderstanding. She had told him what she wanted. He was looking at her as though he liked hearing it.
“Is there anyone I ought to know about?” she asked. “In your life. Before you ask.”
“No. No one I’m seeing, no one waiting at home for a different version of this conversation.”
She nodded, grateful for the unembellished answer.
“And you?”
“No.” She hesitated. “Blake isn’t—”
“I know.”
She looked at him sharply, then saw his expression. No dismissal. He had heard her account of the life she was making, not mistaken a child’s father for an unfinished romance.
“Good,” she said.
He moved his hand a few inches across the table. She put hers beside it, then let their fingers touch. The contact was small and deliberate, nothing either of them could attribute to reaching for the same object.
“I’d like to take you to dinner,” he said. “On our own.”
“I’d like that.”
“Next Saturday? The twenty-fourth?”
She thought through the week. Willa, school, the sitter she’d need to ask. She could check in the morning. It was possible to agree because she wanted to go and arrange the practical things afterward.
“Yes.”
“No model required.”
“No sample fabrics?”
“I might struggle, but I’ll try.”
She laughed. His fingers closed lightly around hers, then released them before the small touch became a way of avoiding the invitation she’d asked him to make.
“I’ll send you a time tomorrow,” he said.
“You could just tell me.”
“Seven?”
“Seven.”
They turned out the work lights together. Maren photographed the failed bracket and left a plain note in the project folder, with the red door in its labeled tray. Nothing had been fixed by being wanted. The work would still need them on Monday.
At the staff entrance Simon helped her into her coat. His fingers touched the collar where her hair had caught beneath it, and he waited while she pulled the black waves free. The tenderness of the ordinary act nearly undid her resolve about kissing him here.
She turned around.
“Saturday,” he said.
“Saturday.”
He smiled with an unmistakable happiness that made his face look younger. Not polished, not the founder on the company website, simply a man who had asked a woman out and liked her answer.
Maren had spent the first half of this month doing a thing she had feared for years. It had not made her suddenly fearless. She was frightened now of wanting too much, of choosing badly, of the way a private hope could reach into rooms where her daughter lived.
She also wanted to see what he’d wear when he wasn’t coming to work.
The second thought made her smile, and she let him see it.
He opened the door. The waiting car cast a warm rectangle of light across the pavement. She stepped toward it, then turned back once more.
“Dinner,” she said. “A date.”
“A date,” he agreed.