She saw him on a Tuesday, which felt wrong. Significant things should happen on significant days. Tuesdays were for supply orders and broken equipment and the specific exhaustion of realizing the walk-in refrigerator was making a sound it hadn't made yesterday.
Ethan Calloway was standing at the front counter with flour on his hands — which made no sense, because as far as Nora knew he wasn't a baker — and that same unhurried smile that she had spent a decade trying to classify as ordinary. She had never quite managed it.
"Nora." He said her name the way people say the name of something they're surprised still exists.
"What are you doing here?" she asked. It came out more direct than she intended. She had always been better at tone in writing.
"Mrs. Carver asked me to fix the shelving unit in the back." He held up a small toolkit as evidence. "I do finish carpentry now. Among other things." The smile didn't waver. It was the most irritating thing about him, that smile — how it never seemed to be performing anything. "You look good."
"You have flour on your hands."
"I shook your mother's hand. She was baking."
Nora looked at the toolkit. She looked at the smile. She looked at the door behind him, which was open to a Tuesday afternoon that was not cooperating with any of her carefully held ideas about how this encounter would not happen.
"The shelving unit is in the back," she said finally. "Try not to touch anything that's already broken."