Chapter 5

The Hadley Spring Showcase took over four blocks of downtown. White tents. Bunting. A banner over the main intersection with Brittany's name in a font two sizes bigger than the event's.

She met them at the check-in table in a blazer the color of money. "Sol! And — oh. Hannah came too." Her eyes did the audit, the quick sweep that priced you and filed the receipt. "Placement. The featured aisle's for our anchor vendors, you understand. I've got you at forty-one. By the parking lot." A pause. "Lovely energy back there."

"Forty-one's fine," Hannah said. It was a gravel lot at the dead end of the last row, where the foot traffic thinned to nothing and the sun came in sideways. Brittany was watching for the flinch — the small wound that told her the placement had worked. Hannah didn't give her one.

"And the fee. Six hundred. Before you set up — curated event, tight budget." She held out the card reader with two fingers, like even the transaction was charity.

Hannah opened her bag. She didn't reach for a card. She counted out six hundred-dollar bills, crisp, in the daylight, and laid them in Brittany's palm one at a time.

It was theater. She knew it. A flat little tell dropped where exactly one person would read it wrong. Brittany read it wrong. Hannah watched the math move behind her eyes — where does a one-salary mortgage couple get six hundred cash without blinking — and watched her land on the wrong answer. Desperation. Cole's overtime. A credit-card draw. Anything but the truth. The truth was never on Brittany's menu.

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

"It spends the same."

Brittany pocketed the bills without counting them and tucked them somewhere Hannah suspected the Showcase's tight budget would never see. That was fine. Hannah hadn't paid six hundred dollars for a corner. She'd paid it to stand exactly here when the buyer walked the row — at the one table Priya already knew by name.

Sol's hands shook a little setting out the linens, and not from the cold. "She put us by the dumpsters, Han."

"She put us where the buyer has to walk past every other booth to reach us," Hannah said. "Set out the blue ones in front."

They set up at forty-one. Sol's stoneware caught the gravel light and looked better than it would have under the bright tent — real things do, in honest light. By ten, the crowd came. By eleven, a steady little knot of people had walked all the way to the back row to find them.

Cole came on his lunch break, still in his work shirt with the name patch. He stood at the edge of the booth, looking at the crowd around Sol's table with a plain, uncomplicated pride. He fixed a wobbling display leg with the multitool off his belt before anyone asked. An older woman buying two candles told him he ought to run his own booth next year — fix folks' broken things right here at the market. He laughed. "Maybe someday." Hannah filed that away too, next to the key with no door.

A girl no older than twenty counted out cash for a single mug and said she'd been saving since the website went up. Sol turned away and pretended to fix the display.

At noon, Brittany took the little stage by the intersection and tapped the mic twice. She welcomed Hadley to the Showcase she'd built. Then she leaned in with the smile of a woman about to spend a coin she didn't own.

"A special announcement. Some of you have heard a rumor. 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." She let it land. "You never know who's watching."

Heads turned. Vendors straightened. A reporter from the county paper lifted a camera. Brittany had built a room full of people primed to watch a buyer arrive — and pointed every one of them at the back row without knowing it.

The crowd gave her the applause she'd built it for. 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 calls and emails to set the appointment, had never once heard the name Brittany Whitfield.

She slid the phone back in her bag and looked down the long row to the gravel, where Sol's quiet table waited in the honest light.

Keep clapping, she thought. You just stood on a stage and invited the whole town to watch.