Chapter 5

The Hadley Spring Showcase took over four blocks of downtown — white tents in neat rows, bunting strung between the lampposts, and a banner over the main intersection with Brittany's name on it in a font two sizes larger than the event's. Hannah noticed that first. She noticed everything that morning, the way you notice the weather before a long drive.

Brittany met them at the check-in table in a blazer the color of money and a clipboard she did not need, because Brittany had a girl with a real clipboard standing just behind her. "Sol! And — oh, Hannah, you came too. How sweet." Her eyes did the audit they always did, the quick downward sweep that priced a person and filed the receipt. "Now, about placement. The featured aisle is for our anchor vendors — the established brands, you understand — so I've got you down for, let me see, spot forty-one. By the parking lot." She said it the way you'd seat a poor relation at the children's table. "There's a lovely energy back there."

"Forty-one's fine," Hannah said. It was not fine — it was a gravel lot at the dead end of the last row, and Brittany knew it, and was watching to see the flinch. Hannah declined to provide one.

"And the fee," Brittany went on, brisk now, sensing she hadn't landed the blow. "Six hundred. We do need it before you set up — the curated events run on a tight budget." She held out the little card reader with two fingers, as if even the transaction might be charity.

Hannah opened her bag. She did not reach for a card. She counted out six hundred-dollar bills, crisp, in full daylight, and laid them in Brittany's palm one at a time. It was theater and she knew it — a small flat tell dropped where exactly one person would read it wrong, and Brittany read it exactly wrong. Hannah watched the recalculation move behind her sister-in-law's eyes, the new question forming: where does a one-salary mortgage household get six hundred in cash without blinking? She watched Brittany decide it was desperation, or Cole's overtime, or a credit-card advance — anything but the truth. The truth was never on Brittany's menu.

"Cash," Brittany said, amused. "How quaint."

"It spends the same," Hannah said, and pocketed the receipt.

They set up spot forty-one. Sol's stoneware caught the morning light off the gravel and looked, Hannah thought, better here than it would have under the featured aisle's bright tent — the way real things always look better in honest light. Gus arranged the linen. Sol's hands shook a little, not from the cold. By ten the crowds came, and by eleven there was a small steady knot of people at spot forty-one who had walked all the way back past the anchor vendors to find them.

Cole came by at half past eleven on his lunch break, still in his work shirt with the name patch, and stood at the edge of spot forty-one looking at the knot of customers with an expression Hannah loved on him — plain, uncomplicated pride that had no angle in it. He fixed a wobbling table leg with the multitool from his belt before anyone asked, because that was simply what his hands did, and an older woman buying two candles told him he should set up a booth of his own next year, fixing folks' broken things right here at the market. He laughed and said maybe someday, and Hannah filed that away too, next to the key without a door. A girl no older than twenty bought a single mug with cash she counted carefully and said she'd been saving for it since the website went up, and Sol had to turn away and pretend to reorganize the linen.

At noon Brittany took the little stage by the main intersection, tapped the microphone twice, and welcomed Hadley to the Showcase she had built. Then she leaned into the mic with the smile of a woman about to spend a coin she did not own. "And I have a special announcement," she said. "Some of you have heard a rumor — and I'm here to confirm it. I have personally arranged for a buyer from a major national retailer to be here today, scouting our local talent. So look sharp, everyone. You never know who's watching."

The crowd gave her the applause she had built it for, and Brittany stood in the middle of it glowing, certain every clap belonged to her.

Hannah checked the time. The buyer Brittany had just taken public credit for was due in ninety minutes — and across three weeks of emails and calls to set the appointment, had never once heard the name Brittany Whitfield in her life. Hannah slid the phone back into her bag, looked down the long row to the gravel where Sol's quiet table waited in the honest light, and thought: let her keep clapping. She has no idea she just announced her own undoing to the whole town, and stood up on a stage to invite them all to watch it happen.