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Ivy closed her notebook. “Good. Then you understand exactly what hiding that report cost us tonight.”

“The timing⁠—”

“The timing is the whole thing.” She turned to the merchants. “I was wrong. I thought working beside us would teach him to ask before he used what we gave him.”

Frank moved toward me. “I want the full lease terms for my building. Tonight. Every clause, every schedule, every promise you think is standard.”

“Same,” Pearl said, steady despite everything in her eyes. “Margaret brought me soup. You don’t get that kind of trust because your forms are standard, and you don’t put it at risk without asking.”

“The leases are standard commercial terms with no penalty clauses.”

“Then bring the whole thing and read it with us.”

It broke into cross-talk. Owen tried to restore order. Three merchants stayed to demand their terms in writing. The rest left in tight, quiet groups, exchanging looks that had nothing to do with garland.

Nora was gone before I could reach her.

Owen came over last, tired all the way through. “The mandate stands,” he said. “The festival is less than six weeks away, and you’re both still on it.” He put his papers under his arm and stopped at the door. “For what it’s worth, Cole, I made the same mistake in ninety-six with the water bond. I decided people couldn’t handle the whole truth and chose for them. Took me eleven years to get invited to a barbecue.”

Then he was gone too, and the hall lights went off in sections, somebody working their way toward the exit.

I’d called her dangerous in a parking lot my first week here, with my hand already on the car door. I’d meant it as a compliment.

I stayed where I was. Behind me, the projector kept the 1902 plan bright on the wall of the empty room. Whoever had drawn it understood this street better than I did.

CHAPTER 7

NORA

Four days after the committee meeting, I still couldn’t stop seeing Griffin’s face after I spoke.

The room had turned on him, and I had led it.

Whatever he had expected from me after the archive, it had not been that.

That was the part that kept me up. It was two in the morning, and I lay flat on my back in the apartment over the Christmas store. I kept replaying Griffin on his knees on the stone floor. He’d traced the expansion joints with one finger and said they built the flexibility in, as if he’d found something he’d wanted since he was twenty-two.

I’d decided he was working me before I gave him a chance, in a room full of people who needed me to decide.

By seven, I had given up on sleep and gone downstairs. I had barely switched on the shop lights when Pearl knocked on the front window. She stood outside with two coffees and the kind of patience that meant she planned to stay until I talked. I unlocked the door. “You look like something that got left out in the rain.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m being generous. Ivy says you look worse.” She set the cup down and got up on the stool across the counter, both elbows planted. “Talk.”

“I won.”

“You did. Half this street has Griffin’s lease on the kitchen table and a pen beside it. He was going to remake Main Street. Now he can’t buy a cup of coffee without somebody checking the receipt for a demolition clause.” She waited. “So why do you look like that?”

I turned the cup a quarter turn on the counter and didn’t drink it. “Because he wasn’t working me. Not in the archive. He was genuinely excited about those plans.” It came out slower than I wanted it to. “Then I told him about my father, and he didn’t use it to make me trust him. He didn’t answer with a story about himself or ask for anything in return. He just listened. Pearl, I’d stake the shop on that.”

“Then why’d you take his head off in front of the committee?”

“Because I signed him into a restricted archive to help save my shop, and nine hours later he used what we found to sell his redevelopment plan to a grant officer. He never told me what he was doing.”

“Mm.” Pearl drank her coffee and let the quiet go on until I filled it.

“I treated that like proof he had been using me from the beginning. It wasn’t. He got excited, moved too fast, and never considered who might get hurt. Careless isn’t the same as cruel.”