Chapter 1 - March
At ten-fifteen, Zoé puts a fabric swatch beside my keyboard and asks whether it looks expensive.
«It looks like it knows the price,» I say.
She turns it toward the window, where the March light makes everything in our office look recently returned from a difficult trip. «That’s not the same thing.»
«It is when the customer is paying for it.»
Zoé gives me the look she reserves for decisions she disagrees with but expects to survive. I circle the supplier code on the sample card and slide it back. The hand feel is good, the color is almost right, and the mill has missed the delivery window twice. We can use it for the shell if they commit to the revised date by Friday. If they don’t, we move on. The meeting ends with three action items and one man from procurement saying he’ll see what he can do, which is how men say they have not yet opened the email.
Zoé waits until he leaves. «You’ve made him afraid of you.»
«I’ve made the deadline clear.»
«Same effect, sometimes.»
We return to our desks. I have a campaign deck to approve, two fit notes to review, and a spreadsheet that has been waiting patiently for me to notice one column is wrong. My phone lights beside the trackpad.
Thomas: I drew the boot from the story you told me. The one that ate its owner’s sock.
There is an image under the message. A boot, square-toed and frowning, stands on a small pile of laundry. A sock hangs from its mouth. In the background, a second boot has escaped through a door marked OUT OF SEASON.
I don’t move.
The office continues around me. Someone laughs at the printer. Zoé taps a pen against her lower lip, reading the comments on a line sheet. A delivery truck scrapes through the wet street below.
Thomas does not text me in March.
For two years, he exists in December, at Camille and Valentina’s crowded party, and sometimes the morning after. The second year, we leave separately without exchanging numbers. Last December, after he shows me pages from his comic and says he might send one over, we exchange contacts. We never use them. Until today.
His message has no question or invitation. Just a drawing of a boot committing a petty crime, sent on a Tuesday morning.
The last time I saw him was three months ago. We talked about a story I told while he showed me the first few pages of a comic he had been working on. I remember the drink in my hand, the narrow space beside the coat rack, asking him why the boot was angry. I do not remember telling him about my old hiking boots, though I must have. Before we left, he said he might send me a page. That was why we exchanged numbers. It never came up again. I didn’t remind him.
The previous December comes back in pieces, none of them in order. A glass sweating onto the windowsill. Camille carrying a tray through a room where nobody moved quickly enough to help her. Thomas holding his sketchbook open with one thumb while he tried to make the pages look less important than they were. I had asked about one drawing, then another. He answered the first question and dodged the second. We were interrupted before I could decide if I wanted to ask again.
«You all right?» Zoé asks.
«Yes.»
She glances at my screen. I angle the phone toward myself, an unnecessary movement that tells us both there is something to see. «Friend?»
«A person I know.»
«That is a very specific category.»
«It’s the one I have.»
She accepts this, mostly because she has a call in five minutes. She takes her notes and walks to the glass room. I read the message again, as if it might have acquired a second sentence while I was looking away.
It hasn’t.
At eleven, I present the campaign schedule. At noon, I eat the salad I brought and reject a photo treatment that makes the new insulated jacket look like it was designed for someone who has never been outside. At one-thirty, a sales director asks whether we can move a launch date forward by two weeks. I explain why we cannot, using a calendar and the same tone I use when people ask if a fabric can be both cheaper and better.
My phone stays face down.
At two, I turn it over.
The drawing is still there. This is a new thread, with nothing above it. I saved the number as Thomas, no surname or note about the comic or the party.
I reopen the campaign deck and get through six slides before realizing I’ve been reading the same product description since lunch. The phrasing is perfectly clear. It is also wrong for the jacket, which is meant to be worn in weather that makes people distrust marketing language. I change “versatile warmth” to “warmth without unnecessary bulk,” then delete the word unnecessary. Nobody buys a coat because it has successfully avoided excess.
Zoé leans over the low partition. «Did you just revise that line three times?»
«It was inaccurate.»
«It was a line about a jacket.»
«The jacket has to live with it.»
She turns back to her own screen. «I can’t believe I’m saying this, but go take a walk.»
«I have a meeting at three.»
«It’s two twenty.»
«I know what time it is.»
She lifts one shoulder, accepting that the walk will not happen. I return to the deck. The phone stays beside my keyboard, screen down now, though I have already memorized the drawing well enough to picture the boot’s expression. It is a little too pleased with itself.
I type: Is the boot meant to be a specific boot?
Delete.
I type: I’m glad the story survived.
Delete.
I could acknowledge the drawing or ask where he got the idea. I could wait until the workday ends. Every version sounds like more than his message asks for.
Zoé comes back and drops into her chair. «I need your decision on the blue.»
«The second blue.»
«There are four.»
«The one I circled.»
«You circled two.»
«Then the darker one.»
She looks at the swatches, not me. «You’ve become less useful since lunch.»
«That’s an ambitious conclusion from a color question.»
«I work with you. I know your baselines.»
I put the phone in my desk drawer. It vibrates once against the wood. I leave it there until Zoé takes a call, then reach for it.
The drawing has a title in the corner, handwritten in Thomas’s uneven capitals: WINTER BOOTS: A LOVE STORY.
«Too much,» I say to the empty desk.
I type: The sock was innocent. The boot has always been the problem.
I send it before I can improve the sentence into something less true.
The typing dots appear, disappear, then return.
Thomas: I knew there was a reason I kept the evidence. His answer asks nothing of me, which should make it easy to put my phone down. I read it once more anyway.
I smile at the screen. The sample is still late. The blue is still unresolved. It is just a message, and then another one, sent between meetings in March.
I set the phone beside my keyboard instead of putting it away.
Three months ago, I met Thomas at Camille and Valentina’s annual party. Before that, I met him two New Year’s Eves in a row. The first time, he was a stranger. The second time, he was a coincidence. By last December, I knew what he looked like when he was trying not to show me a drawing.
I did not know he would send it to me in March. I leave the message open while I approve the darker blue. Across the desk, Zoé marks the supplier’s revised date in red and asks if I want the swatches returned. I tell her to keep them until Friday.
