13 October 2026
Willa stopped just inside the flagship and tightened her hand around Maren’s.
“Is it open?”
“Not yet. That’s why we can look around.”
“There’s no people.”
“There are people working. We stay in the part I showed you.”
The temporary wall separated the work floor from the quiet front area, where Maren had asked for a table and two chairs. She’d been here all morning and left at one to collect Willa after the shortened school day. Their planned hour would let her check the paper street from outside with a second pair of eyes before taking her daughter home. It was an arrangement she’d made with the production lead, not a surprise deposit of a child into somebody’s working afternoon.
Simon came down the stairs carrying a rolled floor plan. Willa moved half a pace closer to her mother.
“This is Willa,” Maren said. “Willa, Simon. He owns the toy company.”
He put the plan on a chair rather than trying to shake her hand.
“Hello, Willa.”
“Hello.”
“We haven’t got the best lights on yet. It’s a rather boring toy shop at the moment.”
Willa inspected the empty shelves. “You need toys.”
“We’ve been making a list.”
Maren smiled at him. He smiled back, an instinctive private exchange, and she felt her daughter go still against her side.
She looked down. Willa was staring at the rolled plan as though it had become very interesting.
“Do you want your snack first?” Maren asked.
Willa nodded.
They sat at the table. Maren took out a tub of apple slices and the cracker packet Willa had selected herself. The wooden-spoon princess emerged from the school bag with her scarf twisted backward. A sock rabbit followed, looking slightly flattened by the reading folder.
Simon asked whether Maren had had time to check the latest entrance measurements. She answered automatically, opening the plan to point at the changed line. He leaned one hand on the back of her chair and she caught the clean scent of his shirt. She had spent a ridiculous amount of Monday remembering the way he’d said thank you for supper. Now he was here, real and near, interested in the place her finger was pointing, and she wanted to keep talking.
“Mummy,” Willa said.
“One moment.”
Simon shifted the paper, and they both looked at the new approach.
“Mummy.”
Maren turned. Willa held up a cracker with an almost invisible split through it.
“It broke.”
“It’s still all right to eat.”
“I know.”
Her daughter put it down. Maren saw then that she hadn’t wanted the cracker fixed. She wanted the person who’d brought it.
“We’ll look at that tomorrow,” Maren told Simon, closing the plan.
He straightened. “Yes. Sorry.”
“Can I see the window now?” Willa asked.
“Once you’ve finished your apple.”
“I have.”
The tub was almost full. Maren accepted that finished was a statement about appetite rather than quantity and packed it away.
Simon led them toward the trial section, leaving several feet between himself and Willa. He knew about Sunday; Maren had told him only that the meeting happened and everyone was tired afterward. He hadn’t asked whether Blake had done well. She’d been grateful. She didn’t want a contest in which two men were scored on how they managed the same child.
At the model Willa lifted the princess over a roof.
“Can she go in?”
“Only the head,” Maren said. “She’s a little large.”
“She’s checking for smoke.”
“Excellent. Very thorough.”
Simon watched her lower the spoon into the square.
“Would you like to see something?” he asked. “It isn’t in the shops yet.”
He took a boxed sample from the shelf. Inside was a beautifully made sphere with illuminated tracks, a small glassy planet held in a wooden frame. Maren had seen it in the catalog and mentally put it in the category of things other people bought. Simon turned its control and a tiny ball traveled around a curving path, lighting a trail of stars.
Willa watched for five seconds.
“Can you make it stop?”
He stopped it.
“It’s very clever,” Maren said, then wished she hadn’t rushed to make his offering successful.
“It is,” he agreed. “I had nothing to do with it. My team politely asked me to stay away from the mechanism.”
He looked at Willa. She had put the princess back into her bag and was examining a scrap of brown paper on the table.
“Would you like another turn?”
She shook her head.
“Fair enough.”
He put the sphere back without trying a different setting. Maren saw the moment he might have explained how extraordinary it was and chose not to. It made her want to put her hand against his back. She kept it on Willa’s bag instead.
As soon as the box was closed, Willa changed her mind.
“Can I have the little ball?”
“It stays with the set,” Simon said.
“I could bring it back.”
“I expect you could. But then the people coming tomorrow wouldn’t be able to try it.”
Willa looked at her mother. Maren gave her a sympathetic shrug, which earned an injured look. She wasn’t going to improve the answer by asking for an exception.
“You’ve got lots,” Willa told him, gesturing at the empty shelves.
“We’re going to have lots. This is the only one of these here.”
“Oh.”
He left the box where it was. Willa stood beside it, considering, then poked the corner of its paper label with one fingernail. Simon didn’t offer a different present to make the disappointment go away. Maren hadn’t known she was waiting for that until he didn’t do it.
“Can I draw it?” Willa asked.
“Of course.”
“Not the whole thing. A bit.”
“Whichever bit you like.”
She returned to the table, where the scrap of brown paper had acquired a tear along its edge. Willa poked one finger through it and giggled.
Simon glanced at Maren, bewildered and amused. She smiled. Her daughter had moved on. It was the adults who were still standing beside the unopened box.
Her daughter spread the paper scrap flat.
“Can I draw on this?”
Maren checked that it wasn’t part of the plan. “Yes. Pencils in the side pocket.”
Willa settled at the table, leaving her mother the outer edge of the chair. She began drawing a long shape with ears. Simon sat opposite rather than beside her.
“Rabbit?” he asked after a while.
“It’s a submarine.”
“Of course.”
“The rabbit’s driving.”
He nodded seriously. Willa drew a row of circles.
“Windows?”
She looked at him. “Buttons.”
“I’m not doing very well at this.”
“No.”
Maren covered her mouth with her hand. Simon saw and raised his eyebrows, asking for no rescue.
Willa made the princess stand behind the pencil pot. In a much deeper voice she said, “There is a very big shark.”
Simon looked at the empty tabletop.
“I see.”
“You have to be it.”
He opened and closed his hand, making a remarkably unconvincing shark.
“Oh no,” he said in his ordinary voice. “A submarine.”
Willa looked offended.
“You can’t sound like that.”
“What should I sound like?”
She produced a breathy, rasping noise that made no word Maren could identify. Simon attempted it. The result was considerably worse.
Willa stared at him. Then she laughed, a short unwilling burst she immediately tried to swallow.
He did it again. She laughed properly this time and hid her mouth in her sleeve.
“No. Worse.”
“I can certainly do worse.”
They played for nine minutes. Maren knew because she looked at the clock when it began, afraid she’d have to interrupt, and found herself looking again when Willa announced that the shark was dead. Simon’s hand had been defeated by a sock rabbit piloting a badly drawn submarine. Willa began putting her things away.
“Does the shark get a funeral?” he asked.
“It’s going to the hospital.”
“I thought it was dead.”
“It’s only a game.”
“An excellent distinction.”
He looked at Maren, warmth and amusement plain in his face. Her heart made an unhelpful movement against her ribs. She wanted him because he’d been here, looking faintly foolish and alive, and because when he looked at her that way she forgot to put her mouth into a sensible expression.
Willa leaned her whole weight against Maren’s arm.
“Can we go outside?”
“Yes.”
They checked the window from the pavement. Willa stood on the spot Maren showed her and announced that she could see the paper houses, a workman’s boot and a reflection of a bus. That was as much assistance as Maren had expected. She took a reference photograph from Willa’s height and another from her own.
Simon remained at the door. His phone rang; he checked it, silenced it, and said he had a meeting upstairs. Maren watched him gather the plan they’d abandoned and remembered the work awaiting them both tomorrow.
“Thank you for visiting,” he told Willa.
“Bye.”
“I’ll practice the shark.”
“You don’t have to.”
He smiled. “A lucky escape.”
Willa looked at him for a moment, then at Maren. “Can I stand over there?”
“Beside that post. Where I can see you.”
She went three steps away and ran a finger along the cold metal. Simon lowered his voice.
“The preview dinner on Thursday. Has the invitation come through?”
“It has.”
“There’ll be product people and a few press guests. I’d like you there, but it isn’t a requirement of the commission.”
“I know. I’m checking the evening.”
“Good.”
He glanced toward Willa, then back at her. “I enjoyed Saturday.”
“So did I.”
There was the smallest space in which either of them could have added something else. He looked at her mouth. She knew because she was watching his face too closely to miss it.
“Mummy,” Willa called.
Maren turned at once. Her daughter had no crisis, only a leaf shaped like a hand.
“I’m coming.”
When she looked back, Simon was holding the door for someone leaving with a tool case. He met her eyes over the stranger’s shoulder, and the brief smile they exchanged was enough to make her warm all the way to the corner.
On the train Willa pressed against her side despite an empty seat farther along. Maren put an arm around her and let the carriage rock them together.
“Simon talks lots,” Willa said.
“Sometimes.”
“You do too. When you’re with him.”
Maren looked down. Her daughter was rubbing the bent ear of the sock rabbit between two fingers.
“Did you mind?”
“I didn’t know about the paper.”
“The plan?”
Willa nodded.
“You wanted to know what we were talking about.”
“You were laughing.”
Maren’s chest tightened. She could explain the angle, the street, every mark on the paper, and none of it would answer what Willa had noticed.
“I like talking to him,” she said. “But I didn’t mean to leave you sitting there without me.”
“You were sitting.”
“I know.”
Willa thought, then pushed the rabbit into Maren’s coat pocket. “Don’t squash him.”
Maren held her a little closer. She didn’t ask whether Willa liked Simon. One hour in an unfinished shop wasn’t a referendum she wanted to put in a six-year-old’s hands.
At home her daughter drew another submarine. Maren answered a production email, then shut the laptop and helped find the good green pencil. When Willa went to wash her hands, she opened the Thursday invitation on her phone.
Seven o’clock. A hotel she’d passed a hundred times and never entered. Group product preview, seated dinner, dress code that required her to examine the back of her wardrobe.
She wanted to go. She wanted the food she couldn’t make herself and Simon’s attention across a room. She wanted to wear something nobody could mistake for a sensible work sweater. The desire didn’t make her daughter disappear. It had to fit into the same life as a rabbit in her coat pocket.
She phoned the school-neighbor sitter, who had been collecting Willa twice a month for over a year and knew exactly how many stories constituted ordinary bedtime.
“Thursday?” the woman said. “Until eleven?”
“Home before then. I’ll pay through eleven.”
“She told me about the new puppet stage.”
“I apologize in advance for the thunder button.”
The sitter laughed and confirmed the hours.
Maren accepted the dinner invitation. Then she opened the wardrobe. Her good black dress was on the last hanger, between a coat she never wore and a bag of winter scarves. She put it against herself in the mirror. Her black waves lay against her shoulders, flattened from the day’s damp; her cheeks were pink from the train.
She tried a smile. The dimple appeared before she could decide whether she wanted it to.
From the kitchen Willa shouted that the rabbit had fallen into the submarine.
Maren put the dress on the bed and went to see whether he needed rescuing.