POV: Celeste
The man keeps waving that paper in my face like I cannot read it.
I can read. I have been reading since I was four, and I can see ZONING VIOLATION printed right there in thick black letters. I am standing very still behind my counter because moving feels dangerous right now, like the floor might tilt if I take one wrong step.
"Ms. Wade." Inspector Cole says my name the way someone talks to a barking dog. Not angry exactly. Just done. "The notice was filed three weeks ago. You had time to respond."
"I never got it."
"That is not my problem."
Something moves in my chest that I cannot name right now. Not anger exactly. More like the thing underneath anger, the part that does not shake.
"It is your problem," I say. "Because if your office filed a notice and it never reached me, something went wrong on your end. Which means you cannot stand here and act like I chose to ignore it."
"The record shows delivery."
"The record is wrong."
He looks at me the way men like him always look. Like I am a stain they are waiting to dry. He has never once reconsidered a decision in his life. I can tell just by his face.
My father built this shop with his own hands. He installed that front window himself, slightly crooked, off by two degrees, because the level he borrowed turned out to be broken and he never figured out why. It still catches me off guard when the light hits it wrong. It still makes me something complicated in spite of everything.
I am not handing this building over because of a piece of paper.
"Forty thousand dollars," I say. "For a violation I did not cause."
"Thirty days to pay or the property goes into review."
"Review means what exactly?"
He finally looks directly at me. "It means the city has the right to begin proceedings."
I know what proceedings means. I have watched it happen to two businesses on this block. It means they fold you into a process with lawyers and delays until the thing you love becomes just a number in a file somewhere.
"Get out," I say.
"Ms. Wade."
"I heard you. Thirty days. Now get out of my shop."
He leaves. The little bell above the door rings, same as it always has, that small cheerful sound from my whole childhood, and then the shop goes quiet.
Six hundred dollars. That is what is in my account. I checked it before I opened this morning, the same way I check every morning, half hoping the number has changed. It never changes.
I walk to the back, past the supply cabinet, past the shelf where my father kept his reference books that I have never moved or touched or rearranged in two years. I stop outside the bathroom door.
There is a test on the edge of the sink. I left it there twenty minutes before the inspector arrived and told myself I would look at it after he left.
He has left.
I stand in the doorway a moment longer than I should. Then I make myself look.
Two lines.
I already knew. Not because I am clever. Because my body has been telling me for two weeks, the kind of tired that does not fix with sleep, the smell of coffee turning strange, the way I had to leave the room when Petra heated up her lunch last Thursday. I knew. But knowing a thing and having it confirmed are two completely different experiences, and right now my legs are not reliable so I sit down on the bathroom floor with my back against the cabinet.
Forty thousand dollars.
Two lines.
Six hundred dollars.
Thirty days.
I sit there and do not think about any of it directly. I think about the broken level instead. I think about my father standing on a step stool, squinting at the window frame, convinced he was doing it right.
Eventually I get up. I wash my face. I go back out to the front and stand behind the counter because that is what I do. I have done it every single day since he died and I am going to keep doing it because I do not know how to stop.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
It is an email. The sender is a law firm I have never heard of. The subject line has my address in it. My address. Wade and Ink on South Meridian.
I open it slowly because some part of me already knows this is not going to be good news.
I read it once. Then I read it again, slower, the way you re-read something when the words are not connecting to anything you understand.
A private property claim was filed on this building this morning. Not by the city. Not a tax issue. A private claim, filed by a firm called Hartwell and Crane Associates, on behalf of a client whose name appears nowhere in the email.
My shop. My father's shop. Someone has filed on it and I do not know who.
I set the phone down. I pick it back up.
I think about calling Jada. I think about calling Damon, except the time difference is complicated and I do not know what to say. A lawyer would help except lawyers cost money and I have six hundred dollars.
I put the phone face down.
Then I flip it back over and search the firm name. Hartwell and Crane Associates, Chicago. Corporate law. Real estate acquisitions. Their client list is company names I do not recognize.
Except one.
Steele Development.
I stare at that name for a long time. Then I search it.
Rock Steele, 32. Former professional hockey player. Owner of Steele Development Group, a real estate and entertainment corporation worth four point seven billion dollars.
There is a photo. He is standing outside a glass tower, looking at the camera like the city already belongs to him.
I have seen that face before.
That is the man who was in my shop two hours ago. Sitting in my chair. The walk-in I booked before the inspector arrived, who spent forty minutes talking while I sketched a custom design on his forearm, asking questions I thought were just conversation.
He already knew.
He was sitting in my chair and he already knew exactly what he had come to take.
The bell above the door rings.
I look up.
He is standing in my doorway.