SHELF LIFE

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Cold politeness, it turned out, was exhausting in a way the war had never been.

The war had at least had energy to it — chalkboard insults, cat custody disputes, the electric charge of two people who couldn't stand each other and couldn't stop noticing each other either. This was different. This was Nash showing up to festival meetings exactly on time, exactly professional, discussing tent placement and vendor timing in a tone so carefully neutral it made Ivy's teeth ache, and Ivy matching him beat for beat, both of them performing a version of fine so thorough it fooled absolutely nobody on Maple Street.

"You two are being weird," Del announced on Wednesday, arranging festival centerpieces with the focus of a woman who fully intended to keep pushing until someone told her something. "Weirder than the dating rumor weird. This is a different weird. This is sad weird."

"We're being professional," Ivy said. "There's a difference."

"There's a difference between professional and whatever you two did during Monday's meeting, which I heard about from three separate people, none of whom I asked, all of whom described it as 'like watching two people return library books to each other in total silence.'"

"We finalized the reading schedule. That's what a reading schedule finalization looks like."

"Ivy."

"I don't want to talk about it, Del."

Del set down her shears with the particular gentleness of someone who'd decided to change tactics. "Okay. I won't push. But for what it's worth — and I say this as someone who has watched this whole thing from a flower bucket nine feet away for a month — whatever happened, the version of you that came back from it looks a lot more like the version of you from before he ever showed up. And I didn't love that version as much as I thought I did, now that I'm seeing the difference."

Ivy didn't have an answer for that, so she didn't give one, and went back to folding festival programs with a focus that had nothing to do with the programs at all.

Across the street, things weren't going noticeably better. Nash had thrown himself into the coffee-and-wine-evening programming with the specific intensity of a man avoiding something, according to his own barista, a college kid named Theo who mentioned to absolutely everyone in a four-block radius that "the boss has been weird since like Tuesday, keeps rewriting the same paragraph of the festival email like six times."

Mayor Pruitt, sensing trouble the way certain golden retrievers sense a thunderstorm three hours before it arrives, cornered Ivy outside the community center on Thursday.

"Everything all right with the co-hosting situation?" he asked, with the studied casualness of a man who had clearly rehearsed this. "Only ask because the funding technically requires — and I want to stress technically, Ivy, I'm not trying to be difficult — a 'collaborative spirit' through the day of the event itself."

"Everything's fine, Mayor."

"Because if there were, hypothetically, some kind of falling-out—"

"There's no falling-out. We're professionals."

"That's what your face said during Monday's meeting too, and I have to tell you, as someone who's run four decades of budget negotiations in this town, I know exactly what a falling-out with a smile on top looks like."

Ivy didn't dignify that with a response, mostly because she suspected he was right and didn't have the energy to argue with an accurate assessment.

The truth, if she let herself sit with it for longer than the length of a folded program, was that the cold politeness wasn't punishing Nash nearly as much as it was punishing her. She missed the banter. She missed the almost-smile he filed away for later. She missed, humiliatingly, the specific weight of his hand over hers on a diner table in a town forty minutes from here, and she hated that missing it didn't feel any less real just because she'd decided, unilaterally and possibly unfairly, that the whole thing had an asterisk on it now.

She caught him once, Friday evening, through the window of The Gilded Page — alone, after hours, staring at his laptop with the specific stillness of someone not actually working, just sitting with something heavy. She almost went in. She stood on the sidewalk for a full thirty seconds, hand halfway to the door, before Marmalade, who had followed her out on one of her increasingly frequent unsupervised expeditions, wound around Ivy's ankles and looked up at her with an expression Ivy could only describe as deeply disappointed.

"I don't know what to say to him," Ivy told the cat, quietly, on an empty sidewalk. "I don't know how to ask if it was real without finding out for certain that it wasn't."

Marmalade, for once, had no comment. She just sat down on the cold pavement and waited, patient, until Ivy's hand dropped back to her side and they both walked home instead — past the window, past the light, past the version of the evening where she might have knocked.

The festival was eleven days away. The tents were booked. The posters were up in both windows, two shop names bridged by a spine neither of them could currently look at without something complicated crossing their face, and Willowbrook, sensing blood in the water the way small towns always do, had started a new f*******: poll.

This one had eighty-nine comments. Nobody was betting on "definitely together" anymore.