SHELF LIFE

CHAPTER TEN

The email arrived on a Tuesday, which Ivy was beginning to think was cursed, forwarded to her by accident — an honest, mundane accident, the kind that ends relationships in paperback novels for exactly the reason it was about to end whatever this was between her and Nash Calloway.

Nash had asked her to help finalize the festival's shared vendor list, and in a rush before a supplier call, he'd forwarded her the wrong thread. Instead of tent rental quotes, Ivy found herself looking at an email chain three months deep, subject line RE: Gilded Page — Regional Rollout Timeline, sender listed only as R. Ashford, Meridian Capital.

She read it once. Then, with the specific, sick thoroughness of someone building a case against herself, she read it again.

Nash — great update from the Willowbrook location. Foot traffic and community engagement numbers are exactly what we hoped for as a proof of concept. Let's talk seriously about the next three sites once Q4 numbers are in. If Willowbrook's a success story, it's the blueprint — we scale from here. Excited to see what the festival does for visibility.

Proof of concept. Blueprint. Scale.

Ivy set her phone face-down on the counter like it had bitten her.

She thought about the poster — two halves of the same book — and the diner booth, and his hand over hers, and the way he'd said I want to figure out how there's room on one street for both of us, and felt each of those memories curdle slightly, retroactively, into something that looked a lot more like market research than she'd let herself notice at the time.

Proof of concept. Was that what she'd been. Was the reading nook, the beanbags, the crying naval-thriller man — was all of it just foot traffic data for a pitch deck to a venture capital firm with a name like a pretentious cologne.

She didn't call him. She didn't text him. She did what she always did when something threatened to break, which was retreat into work — reorganizing the poetry section by a system only she understood, restocking the tote bags nobody had bought yet, scrubbing the front window until the glass squeaked, anything that kept her hands too busy to reach for her phone and ask him the question currently lodged sideways in her chest.

He noticed, of course. He noticed within a day, because that was who he'd apparently become to her — someone who noticed.

"Hey." He caught her Thursday afternoon, leaning in her doorway with two coffees, the posture of a man who'd been rehearsing something casual and wasn't quite landing it. "You've been weird for two days. Weirder than the storm. Weirder than the poster avalanche, even, and Marmalade nearly gave us both concussions that day."

"I've been busy."

"You reorganized poetry by a system that made a customer cry this morning. I heard about it from Del before I even got here."

"It's a good system."

"Ivy." He set the coffees down, both of them, untouched, and something in his voice — careful, a little worried — made her look up despite herself. "What happened?"

She could've asked him about it directly. Could've said R. Ashford, Meridian Capital out loud and watched his face and let him explain, given him the same chance for honesty she'd given him in the stockroom during the storm. That would have been the brave thing. It was not, in the moment, the thing she did.

"I saw the investor email," she said instead, flat, arms crossed like a door closing. "The one about the regional rollout. Willowbrook as a — what was the phrase — proof of concept."

Something shifted across his face, fast, the specific expression of a man watching a landmine he'd forgotten about go off six feet behind him. "Ivy, that's — it's not what it—"

"Is Meridian real? Is there actually a plan to turn this into three more stores if the numbers look good?"

"There's a conversation. It's early. It's not—"

"So it's real."

"It's a possibility I haven't said yes to." He stepped closer, and she made herself not step back, mostly out of pride. "I took their money to open this location because I didn't have the capital to do it alone, and part of that deal was always going to include a conversation about what happens if it works. That's not a secret plan, that's just how funding works."

"You didn't mention it."

"Because it hasn't happened yet, and because—" He stopped, ran a hand through his hair, and for the first time since she'd known him, looked genuinely unsure of his own footing. "Because I didn't want you to hear about a hypothetical and immediately think this — think that everything with you was some kind of research project. Which, judging by your face right now, is exactly what's happening, and I don't know how to undo it fast enough."

"Was it not?" The question came out smaller than she meant it to, and she hated that, hated that underneath the anger there was just a plain, unguarded fear she hadn't fully looked at until it was already in the room with them. "You needed foot traffic numbers for a festival that's supposed to prove this town loves your shop enough to justify three more of them. I organized half your programming. I taught you what this town wants. That's — Nash, that's useful information, whether or not it was ever the point."

"It was never the point."

"You don't know that. Not really. You didn't even know it was a live possibility until I found it by accident in a forwarded email, which means it was living somewhere you weren't planning to tell me about, which means some part of you already knew how this would sound."

He didn't have a fast answer for that, and the silence sat there long enough to confirm, for Ivy, everything she'd already decided to believe.

"I need to get back to work," she said, quieter now, some of the fight draining out into something closer to tired. "The tents are booked. The programming's set. We don't actually need to talk outside of festival logistics until the day itself."

"Ivy—"

"Please, Nash." She picked up a stack of return slips that didn't need sorting, just to have something in her hands. "I need a minute that isn't about this. Or you. Or Meridian Capital."

He left, eventually, both coffees still sitting on the counter, going cold the way things did around her lately when she didn't know what to do with them. Marmalade wound around Ivy's ankles once, uncharacteristically gentle, and didn't look smug about anything at all.