Wrong sister, Right man

Chapter 8

Mia

Eastgate smells the same every morning. Wet wool, hot metal, and under that the sweet chemical thing from the dye house, like a candy factory that's had some bad news. My father used to bring me here on Saturdays and park me on an upside-down crate by the looms so I could watch the shuttles go back and forth. I must have been six. I thought they were the most important machines in the world.

I had never once walked in there and felt like a visitor.

It started at the gate. Gus has worked the gatehouse since before I could read, and when my Corolla rolled up he looked at the car, then at me, then took his time finding the button for the barrier.

"Morning, Gus."

"Mrs. Blackwood."

He said it flat. He said it on purpose. Twenty-seven years I'd been Miss Mia, or Richard's girl, or just "kid," and now I was a name that belonged to somebody else's family. I parked inside the gates like I'd promised, wedged between a forklift and a pallet of undyed cotton, and sat there a second with my hands on the wheel.

I texted him. *Arrived. Alive.* Then I got out and walked onto the floor, and the noise of the looms closed over my head.

You can tell when a room stops just seeing you and starts watching you. Nobody stopped working, because nobody at Eastgate ever does, but the shoulders changed. Two women at the end of Line 3 put their heads together. Hector, who runs the dye house and once taught me to swear in three languages, spotted me coming and developed a sudden deep interest in the inside of a vat.

Okay. So that's how it was going to be.

I went up to the mezzanine, to the little glass office where I'd done my best work, and my desk was exactly how I'd left it. Same stapler. Same cold mug. Same crooked stack of production sheets. Somebody had dusted around everything without moving a single thing, which was either respect or a warning, and I honestly couldn't tell which.

I sat down and opened the schedule. It took me about eleven minutes to find the problem.

---

People think running a mill is about the machines. It isn't. The machines mostly do what they're told. It's about the order you tell them things in. Which job goes first, which color comes after which, how long a vat sits empty while somebody scrubs it out. The money doesn't leak out of the big stuff. It leaks out between one job and the next.

And Eastgate was leaking like crazy.

Someone had been running the dye house by due date. Navy, then cream, then burgundy, then pale yellow, then charcoal, because that was the order the customers needed them in. Sounds reasonable. It's a disaster. Every time you go from a dark lot to a light one you have to flush the whole system or your cream comes out looking like weak tea. I counted six full washdowns on that one sheet that a better order would never have needed. Three or four hours each. In one week.

I took the sheet and went to find Hector.

He was standing at the big vat with his arms crossed and he didn't look up. "If you're here to tell me how to do my job, Miss Mia, don't."

"Mrs. Blackwood, I hear."

His jaw worked. "I didn't say that."

"Gus did. It's fine." I held out the paper. "I'm not here to tell you anything. I'm asking why you're flushing the system six times a week."

"Because it needs flushing."

"Between the burgundy and the pale yellow? Sure it does. Who put the yellow after the burgundy?"

"Planning office sends it down that way."

"And who's in the planning office?"

"Nobody, since you left." He finally looked at me, and he didn't look angry. Mostly he looked tired. "Your dad gave it to Dennis from accounts. Dennis does it by due date."

"Dennis does it by due date," I said, and I had to cover my mouth. Hector's face went through about four things, and then he laughed, a short rusty bark, and shut it down fast.

"Don't tell him I said so."

"Hector. If I flip the week around, pale colors first, then the mid-tones, then the deep ones, and flush once at the end, how many hours do you get back?"

He's not a man who needs a calculator. He read down the sheet with his lips moving.

"Fifteen," he said. "Sixteen, maybe."

"In a week."

"In a *week*." He stared at me. "That's two whole shifts."

"Two shifts you've been paying people to stand around watching water turn purple."

"Mauve."

"It's purple, Hector."

"It's aubergine, and you're not going to—" He stopped and pinched the bridge of his nose. "How did nobody catch this?"

"Everybody was too close to it." I shrugged. It was true, and if I said what I really thought I'd get sentimental. *Because I was gone, and nobody told Dennis what he didn't know.*

"So she's staying, then."

That was Bernie, behind me. She runs the weave floor. She's built like a fire hydrant and wears her gray braid down her back like a rope, and she was holding a clipboard with a face like a shut door.

"She's staying," said Hector.

"How long?"

"Depends how fast she can clean up this mess."

"I never said it was a mess," I said.

"You didn't have to." Bernie didn't smile. "I can read."

I decided to count that as a start.

---

I was on my feet all day. I redid the whole week by hand, because I trust paper more than any program, and by noon there was a new schedule on the board outside the dye house with the dark colors circled in red. By two, three people had come over to look. By four, Hector had moved the burgundy job himself and was telling anyone who'd listen that it had been his idea.

Fine by me. It works better when they think they thought of it. My dad calls that manipulation. I call it getting things done without making anybody eat their pride.

The floor warmed up a little, the way things warm up in winter, grudgingly and not all at once. Somebody I didn't know brought me a coffee. And around three, Lucille, who's been at her loom for thirty-one years, caught my sleeve as she walked by and said, low, "Is it true he's a monster?"

I stopped with the cup halfway to my mouth. "Who?"

"Blackwood. People say he's cold as a fish. That he threw some girl out of his office and she broke her arm."

*She didn't break her arm,* I almost said. *She fell. I watched her fall.*

And then I caught myself, because what I'd been about to say, with my mouth already open, was *it wasn't quite like that.* Except it was exactly like that. I saw it. I'd lain awake over it.

"I don't know him very well yet," I said.

Lucille looked at me for a long time. She can spot a bad thread from across a room, and she wasn't missing this one.

"Huh," she said, and went back to work.

I thought about that the rest of the afternoon. Not that I'd nearly stood up for him, but that I'd wanted to.

---

At 5:40 I was packing up when Bernie knocked on the glass.

"Walk with me."

We went down to the loading bay. The big doors were rolled up and the light outside had gone orange. Trucks were lined up on the road in the early dark. She stood beside me for a minute without saying anything, and then, "I don't like this deal."

"I don't either."

"Your father says it's the only way."

"My father says a lot of things."

That got a smile out of her, a small bitter one. "He does." She tucked the clipboard under her arm. "People on the floor are scared, you know. Not of you. Of what happens once he owns the place. Whether we're a hundred and forty in the spring or sixty."

"It won't be sixty."

"You can't promise that."

"I'm not promising. I'm telling you what I'm going to make sure of." I looked at her. "I wrote the retool plan. I wrote the terms. I'm running it. Nobody on this floor goes unless I go first."

She studied me for a long while. Then she gave one short nod, like someone setting a stone on a wall.

"Okay, Mia," she said.

Mia. Not Mrs. Blackwood, not Miss. She hadn't said my name in a year, and I had to look out at the road for a second to get my face under control.

That was when I saw him.

Across the road, on the far sidewalk, under the one streetlight that still worked. A man in a gray coat with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched, like he was waiting for a bus. Except there's no bus stop on that stretch. There never has been. And he wasn't looking at the trucks, or the road. He was looking at the loading bay. At me.

When he saw me notice, he didn't look away. He just stood there and let me look. Something about how patient he was made the skin on my arms go tight.

"Bernie. Do you know that guy?"

She glanced over. "What guy?"

I looked back. The sidewalk was empty. The streetlight hummed over nothing.

"Never mind," I said. "Long day."

---

I was halfway across the lot when I remembered the text. Four seconds, no diary, that was the deal. I got my phone out and typed *Leaving.* Then I deleted it. I couldn't tell you why. It was a small thing and I'd agreed to it. But the man in the gray coat had gotten under my skin, and I had a weird feeling I'd just been shown something on purpose.

I got to the Corolla and stopped.

There was an envelope under the windshield wiper. White, no writing on it, tucked flat against the glass like someone had been careful about it.

My car had been inside the gates all day. Gus's barrier had been down. Nobody gets through that gate without being seen.

I looked left, then right, at the pallets and the dark windows and the line of trucks. Then I pulled the envelope off and opened it, and my fingers weren't completely steady.

One sheet of paper. Typed, not handwritten. Nine words.

*Ask your husband where the Harlow Street money went.*

I read it three times. Then I read it again, in case it had changed. It hadn't.

Clause 15 said I couldn't ask him about his past. I wrote that clause myself, with a pen I had to borrow. But this wasn't the past. This was now. This was my family's plant and my family's land, and somebody had gotten past a locked gate to tell me my husband was lying.

My phone buzzed in my hand and I flinched so hard I almost dropped it.

*Damian: You haven't texted that you've left.*

Forty-one minutes past the end of the shift. He'd noticed. He had been *counting.*

I stood there in the orange dark next to my beat-up little car, with a stranger's note in one hand, and I didn't know if the man on the other end of that text was protecting me or watching me.

I typed *Leaving now.* Then, slowly, with my heart going like a loom, I folded the note in half and put it in my pocket.

I didn't tell him.

That was the first lie I ever told my husband.