Page 6 of Soft Serve

I set my jacket over the back of a chair and move toward the counter, stopping on the customer side of it. A boundary she didn't ask me to observe, but I observe it anyway.

"You can sit," she says, nodding toward the stools.

I sit.

She finishes what she's doing, rinses the cloth, dries her hands, and then turns to face me with her arms crossed and the full weight of her attention, which is, I'm discovering, a considerable thing.

"You came alone this morning," she says. "No team, no contracts, and no materials."

"Yes."

"And now?"

I reach into the inside pocket of my jacket and produce a single folded document. Not a deck, not a folder, just four pages, and I slide it across the counter toward her.

She doesn't pick it up immediately. She looks at it like it might do something she hasn't anticipated.

"That's not a contract," I say. "It's an outline. What the campaign would involve, what we'd need from the shop, what the timeline looks like, and what Soft Serve would receive in return."

"What we'd need from the shop," she repeats, and the emphasis is precise.

"What I'd need," I correct. "From you."

Her jaw tightens slightly, then she picks up the document.

I watch her read it the way I've watched people read a lot of documents in my life, except that most of those people are looking for leverage, and Paloma Reyes is looking for reasons to say no. It's a different kind of reading. More thorough, in its own way.

The shop settles around us. Somewhere outside, a truck passes, the low rumble of it fading down the street. The freezer hums its steady note. I'm acutely aware that this is the first time since I arrived in Hearts Bend that the noise of the town isn't pressing in from every angle, and the quiet has a texture to it I didn't expect.

She turns the second page.

"You want exclusivity for the day," she says.

"For the campaign content, yes. We wouldn't prevent the shop from operating normally."

"But your cameras would be here."

"Outside, initially. Nothing behind the counter without your explicit agreement."

She looks up at that. A brief, assessing look, like she's checking whether I mean it.

"Initially," she says.

"I'm not going to pretend I don't want more access as the day progresses," I say. "But nothing happens without your agreement at every stage."

She holds my gaze for a moment, then goes back to the document.

She reads the way she works, I'm realizing. Without wasted motion, without performance, with a quality of focus that makes the room feel like it's arranged around her rather than the other way around.

I don't know what to do with that observation, so I set it aside.

"The compensation is fair," she says, and it sounds like it costs her something to admit it.

"It's more than fair," I say. "You can have a lawyer look at it."

"I will," she says immediately.

"Good."