Derek stares at the blouse. “That’s not what we—”
“I know what we approved.” I’m already moving. “The sweater doesn’t work. This does. Do you want the shot or do you want to argue about it?”
He does not argue about it.
Twenty minutes later, the model is restyled and the look is different from what we planned and better than what we planned, and when Derek sees the first image on the monitor he goes very quiet in the way that means he’s doing the mental work of deciding whether to admit I was right.
“It’s good,” he says finally.
“It’s better than good,” I say pleasantly, and go back to work.
By the time we wrap at four-thirty, I’m running on the specific adrenaline of a problem solved under pressure, which is its own kind of high, and I want to tell someone about it. I want to tell one specific someone about it, the someone who would listen with actual attention and make the dry observation that I was right and Derek was wrong and then ask a technical question about the color issue because he’s been paying enough attention to know what questions to ask.
I pick up my phone.
His name is right there.
I call.
It goes to voicemail after two rings, which means he’s on the ice or in a meeting or somewhere that requires his phone to be off, and I get the standard Bennett Foster voicemail which is just his name and the instruction to leave a message, delivered in thetone of a man who considers voicemail a mild inconvenience at best.
“Hey,” I say. “It’s me. I know you’re probably at practice or something. I just—there was a thing today with the shoot, and I wanted to tell you about it. It’s fine. I handled it. I just wanted to—” I pause. Hear myself. “I’ll tell you later. Good luck tonight.”
I hang up.
Stand in the hotel hallway for a moment.
I handled it. I always handle it. I have been handling things alone since I was seven years old and my father left and my mother stopped being someone who could handle things, and I had to figure out what that meant for me. I built a whole life around handling things. A salon, a reputation, a brand partnership, a carefully maintained independence that meant no one could ever leave me with something I couldn’t manage on my own.
And I did handle it. The sweater situation is resolved. The shot is better than what we planned. Derek is satisfied, and the campaign is on track, and I did that, by myself, in a hotel room four hours from Sorrowville.
The fact that I wanted to tell someone about it before I was even out of the studio is new.
The fact that someone has a specific face and a specific voice and a specific way of listening that I was already mentally composing the story for on the drive back to the hotel—that’s new too.
I order room service because it’s easier than going out alone, and I watch the Slammers game on my laptop because their road schedule means it’s streaming tonight, and I eat pad Thai on a hotel bed and watch Bennett play hockey from five hundred miles away.
They win. He plays well—really well, the kind of present, instinctive hockey that’s been showing up in flashes since thetimeout game, the version of him that trusts his reads instead of controlling every variable. I watch him set up a goal in the second period with a pass that requires him to trust Holden to be in the right place, and Holden is in the right place, and the bench erupts, and Bennett is already moving to the next play before the celebration finishes.
I’m smiling at my laptop alone in a Minneapolis hotel room.
This is my life now. I find this unreasonably okay.
My phone buzzes at eleven-fifteen, when I’m already in bed with the lights off and the city doing its city things outside the window.
Bennett.
I answer before the second ring. “Hey.”
“Hey.” His voice is low and a little rough the way it gets after a game, when the adrenaline has burned off and what’s left is just him. “Sorry I missed your call. We had a film session after.”
“I watched the game.”
A beat. “Yeah?”
“You played well. The Holden pass in the second.”
“He was there.” A pause. “I trusted he’d be there.”
