Scene 23¶
Scene 23¶
✨ Settling ✨¶
[Publish]
Scene 5 ✨ Second Day ✨
[Celeste POV]
Scene 23 — “Settling” (Celeste POV)¶
The first week wasn’t romantic.
It was friction finding new places to hide.
Charlie moved in on a Tuesday. By Friday, it was obvious that the house was either going to become a second worksite—clean, repeatable, calm—or it was going to dissolve into the kind of domestic mush that eats ambition by the teaspoon.
I wasn’t sentimental about it.
I was annoyed.
Annoyed at the fact that something as stupid as a dish left on a bench could pull my attention away from a paragraph that mattered. Annoyed that my brain, when it got tired, started inventing stories about other people’s motives.
Annoyed, mostly, that I couldn’t afford to waste any time being vague.
So I did what I always did when something mattered.
I wrote it down.
On the kitchen bench sat the terms sheet, clipped to a board like a work order. Beside it, a second page had appeared without ceremony—clean paper, a plain heading in block letters:
HOUSE OPERATIONS
Not cute. Not cosy. Not a joke.
Under it, a list:
- Study hours are sacred
- Meals are scheduled or not assumed
- Laundry is a system, not a favour
- Visitors are agreed, not sprung
- Chores are assigned; no martyrdom
- “Helpful” rearranging is not help
I hadn’t titled it “protocol.” I’d learned the difference. Protocol sounded like hierarchy. Operations sounded like reality.
Charlie had read it twice on the first night. Not with resentment. With the careful concentration he gave to any system that promised to remove guessing.
Then, softly, as if it were a confession: “This makes me feel... calmer.”
“Good,” I’d told him. “It’s meant to.”
He’d nodded. Not happy. Relieved.
The next morning, I woke to the house behaving.
Not silent—normal sounds existed—but predictable. A kettle that clicked and stopped. A cupboard that closed without a slam. A dishcloth hung straight. No new piles.
Charlie was in the kitchen, looking at the whiteboard.
It held two cards now, propped against the marker tray.
One said:
IN SESSION.
The other said:
AVAILABLE.
He’d made them from cardboard and black marker, as if that was all the magic required.
“You didn’t have to,” I said, reaching for my mug.
“I know,” he replied. “It’s just... easier.”
He said it like a fact, not like a gift.
It was the first time I noticed how much of Charlie’s support instinct was not emotional at all—it was mechanical. He didn’t hover because he wanted praise. He reset rooms the way some people reset their posture.
I could live with that.
I could even grow accustomed to it, if I wasn’t careful.
A text came in while I was still standing at the counter.
Lauren.
How’s the house? Is he behaving?
I snorted.
Charlie glanced up. “What?”
“Your mother thinks you’re a puppy,” I said.
His ears coloured. “She— she worries.”
“She’s allowed,” I said, and meant it. Lauren’s adult interference was not meddling. It was guardrails.
I typed back:
House is fine. He’s quiet. We’re not improvising.
A second message arrived almost immediately:
Good. Keep it boring. Boring is safe.
I showed Charlie the message.
He read it and exhaled as if someone had just given him permission to stop performing.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Boring.”
“Exactly,” I replied.
He turned back to the sink and began washing a cup that didn’t strictly need washing. Not because it mattered. Because the motion stitched him together.
I watched for a moment and then, because my brain couldn’t help itself, I asked:
“Does it ever feel like you’re... doing too much?”
Charlie’s hands stilled.
He didn’t look at me.
“No,” he said. Then paused, swallowed. “I mean... I don’t know. I don’t think about it like that. I just... do it.”
“You don’t do it to earn anything,” I said, watching him closely.
He flinched at the implication.
“No,” he said quickly. “No. I don’t—”
“Short answers,” I reminded him.
He stopped. Breathed.
“No,” he said again, steadier. “I don’t.”
That was the difference between a bid and a habit. The bid always contained hunger. The habit contained rhythm.
I took my tea into my room and shut the door.
IN SESSION.
Three hours of work went by in a narrow, clean channel. My mind warmed up. The words stopped fighting me. I could feel, faintly, that beautiful thing that happens when your brain stops negotiating with the world and starts moving through it.
When I came out again, the card on the whiteboard had been flipped.
AVAILABLE.
I found Charlie at the kitchen table with a notebook open, drawing boxes.
Not sketches of clothes. Boxes.
He looked up, startled, then embarrassed, as if he’d been caught doing something childish.
“What’s that,” I asked, nodding at the page.
He hesitated. Then pushed it toward me a fraction.
“It’s... a checklist,” he said.
“A checklist for what?”
He swallowed. “For the museum run.”
My chest tightened, not with romance, with recognition. The work followed him home the way it followed me. That was the danger and the strength of it.
He tapped the page.
“Hardware packs,” he said. “Cut order. QC points. Delivery labels. Like Lauren said. To stop bleeding time.”
I studied his boxes and felt, grudgingly, an admiration that wasn’t soft.
It was practical.
“This is good,” I said.
Charlie blinked. “It is?”
“Yes,” I replied. “It’s clean.”
His shoulders dropped. Relief again. Always relief when someone named the work as work and didn’t turn it into a story about him.
A key turned in the front door.
Lauren came in with a tote on her shoulder, cheeks flushed from the heat, looking like she’d fought traffic and won.
She saw the notebook immediately.
“Ah,” she said, and smiled—not maternally, not indulgently. Proud in the quietest way. “Look at that.”
Charlie went pink.
Lauren set her tote down and began unloading it: a roll of tape, a packet of labels, a small box of grommets, like she couldn’t enter a space without bringing its next solution with her.
“Mara rang,” Lauren said, and her tone shifted—adult, consequential. “Museum’s confirmed pick-up windows. They want reliability. Not ‘sometime Friday.’ Proper time slots.”
Charlie’s pencil hovered over his checklist.
“Can we do that,” he asked.
Lauren’s smile turned sharp.
“Yes,” she said. “If you stop making it up as you go.”
Mara’s voice came through Lauren even when Mara wasn’t there.
I felt my own irritation rise in sympathy—not at the pressure, at the stupidity of the world requiring women to be twice as organised to be taken half as seriously.
Lauren looked at me.
“You’ve got Uni paperwork to do,” she said. “Applications, fees, the whole circus.”
“Yes,” I replied, already feeling tired.
Lauren nodded. “Then we need to protect your hours.”
Charlie’s head lifted.
“You mean—” he started, then stopped himself.
Lauren’s eyes flicked to him—warm, but not soft.
“I mean,” she said, “that if Celeste’s doing this, she does it properly. And if you want to be useful, you be useful in ways that don’t create a mess.”
Charlie nodded once, as if he’d been given a specification.
“Yes,” he said.
Lauren turned back to the table.
“Show me the checklist,” she said, and leaned in beside him, not taking over but joining him like a colleague.
I watched them for a moment—the mother who did adulthood like a craft, the boy who had learned to breathe when a system appeared. Two kinds of steadiness, related but not identical.
Then my phone buzzed.
A message from Mara.
Tomorrow. 7:30. Museum call. Bring the numbers.
I stared at the words and felt the future click into place.
Not as a love story.
As a workload.
As a shop.
As a life that would either be governed... or would take whatever it wanted.
I put the phone down and picked up a pen.
If Mara wanted numbers, she’d get numbers.
And if my study hours were going to survive the museum run, then the house would stay boring.
Not because I was controlling.
Because I was serious.
Charlie looked up from the checklist.
“Do you want me to stop,” he asked, careful, “when you’re writing?”
I met his eyes.
“No,” I said. “I want you to keep it clean.”
He nodded. Not flattered. Not wounded.
Relieved.
And for the first time, I understood the real shape of what was happening:
Charlie wasn’t moving into my life as a romantic gesture.
He was moving into it like a support beam.
Which meant my job wasn’t to be grateful.
My job was to make sure the beam didn’t start thinking it was the roof.
“Good,” I said, and tapped the whiteboard.
“Available,” I added. “For ten minutes.”
Charlie’s mouth twitched—almost a smile.
“Ten minutes,” he echoed, as if time itself could be made safe by being measured.
Lauren laughed softly.
“God,” she said, affectionate. “You two are a pair of weirdos.”
I didn’t deny it.
I set the timer on my phone, sat at the table, and watched them continue to draw boxes.
Work, at least, was something we all understood.
And boredom—sweet, structured boredom—was how we were going to survive.
Interlude — “Sharl” (Celeste POV)
The quote stayed pinned above the ledger like a verdict that had decided to become a policy.
Mara had walked away from it as if it wasn’t a big deal, which was how you knew it was. Paper on a corkboard. Ink. Terms. A deposit schedule that didn’t apologise for existing.
Under the fluorescent lights, it looked almost offensively plain.
Good.
Wardrobe had a talent for making the important things look boring on purpose.
Lauren was rinsing cups in the small sink at the back, humming under her breath—something half-remembered, neither happy nor sad. Charl was at the table with the laptop open, and I could see the way his fingers moved over the keys: not frantic, not eager, simply... steady. Like a person tightening bolts in the correct sequence.
Mara had vanished into the cutting room with the invoice stack, as if she could intimidate paper into behaving.
The front bell gave its small, dry chime.
Lauren looked up first. “Ah—perfect timing.”
A woman stepped in with a kind of compact confidence that felt familiar: not Mara’s severity, not Sarah’s sharpness—something more like clean certainty. She had a scarf looped loosely at her throat and a tote bag slung over one shoulder that looked like it had carried half of Europe at some point. Her hair was dark and pulled back, and her lipstick wasn’t dramatic; it was simply... decided.
“Bonjour,” she said, and the room immediately felt as if it had been given a slightly better spine.
Lauren dried her hands on a towel and crossed to her with a warm, uncomplicated smile. “Celeste, this is Camille—my friend. She’s in town for two days, and she insisted on seeing where I keep disappearing to.”
Camille leaned in and kissed Lauren lightly on both cheeks in a way that was affectionate without being showy, then turned her gaze on me.
“Enchantée,” she said, and offered her hand.
“Celeste,” I replied.
Her eyes flicked around the space—the corkboard, the ledger, the chalk dust that never quite left, the half-assembled stays form on the mannequin—and her expression sharpened with interest.
“This is... an atelier,” she said. Not a question. A conclusion.
Lauren gave a small shrug that somehow managed to look both proud and casual. “Something like that.”
Camille’s gaze landed on Charl at the table.
He looked up, polite, alert in that quiet way of his, and stood halfway as if unsure whether this was the kind of place where you stood.
Camille smiled at him with immediate ease, then said, “Et toi—tu es...?”
Before Charl could answer, Lauren gestured lightly. “That’s Charl. He’s—” she paused, and I saw her catch herself, like she was choosing the cleanest word. “—part of the work.”
Camille’s eyebrows lifted as if she’d been handed a better story than she’d expected.
“Sharl,” she said.
The sound was small. Soft. Like silk sliding through fingers. Sharl.
Charl blinked once.
I watched him do the calculation—whether it mattered, whether it required correction, whether he was being laughed at.
It required none of those things.
“It’s... Charl,” he began, mild.
Camille tilted her head, unbothered. “Oui, oui. Sharl.”
Sarah, who had been leaning in the doorway to the fitting area like a sceptical gargoyle, let out a short, delighted huff. “Oh, that’s better,” she said immediately, as if she’d been waiting for someone to fix a pronunciation problem she didn’t know she was allowed to fix.
Charl looked faintly alarmed at the speed with which the room had turned.
Lauren’s mouth twitched. “Camille,” she warned gently, though there was laughter in it.
“What?” Camille said, innocent. “It is his name.”
“It’s just... not how we say it.”
Camille’s gaze returned to Charl, frank and friendly. “Do you mind?”
Charl hesitated for the length of a breath.
And then his shoulders loosened, because this was not a fight worth having, and also—because it wasn’t a fight at all.
“It’s a name,” he said. “Names... work.”
“That’s the spirit,” Sarah said, pleased, as if he’d passed a test he hadn’t known he was taking.
Camille smiled. “Good. Sharl.”
She said it again—lightly, naturally—and something in the room accepted it the way fabric accepts a pin: with a tiny surrender that becomes, suddenly, structure.
Lauren tried to keep a straight face and failed. “I can’t believe you.”
Camille shrugged, entirely unrepentant. “In France, we make the harsh things softer. It is a talent.”
Sarah grinned. “I’d buy a ticket to watch you do that to Mara.”
Camille’s eyes glittered. “Mara?”
“Don’t,” Lauren said, laughing now. “She’ll do it.”
I should have corrected it. I felt, for half a second, the urge to manage the room—to keep things consistent, to keep the world tidy.
Then I heard myself say, without thinking, “Sharl—can you pull up the revised labour totals?”
The word left my mouth as if it had always lived there.
Sharl.
Charl—Sharl—looked up, and for a fraction of a second I saw the tiniest flicker of surprise. Not offence. Not embarrassment. Just... the recognition that the room had decided something about him without asking his permission.
And then—because he was who he was—he accepted it with a quiet, practical shrug of his attention.
“Sure,” he said, already turning the laptop toward me.
In his expression there was no drama, no identity crisis, no romantic charge. He was too busy doing the real work of being steady to worry about the decorative parts of himself.
But I saw it land anyway—how the name softened him in the air. How it changed the angle of him in conversation.
Sarah said it once, testing it like a new word. “Sharl.”
Lauren said it under her breath, fond despite herself. “Sharl...”
Camille, triumphant, went back to looking around the room like she’d come to admire a machine.
And I—without planning to—kept using it as I spoke. Because it was simply... what the room had become.
In his head, I suspected, it meant nothing.
Or it meant something ridiculous. A private joke. A piece of armour.
Later, when he was alone with the spreadsheet again, I imagined him filing it away with the same mild efficiency he applied to everything else:
Sharl. Fine. Short for Charlemagne. Emperor. Busy. Next.
He typed. The numbers appeared.
The quote stayed pinned above the ledger.
And Wardrobe kept doing what it always did: taking small, human accidents and turning them into systems—clean, repeatable, and strangely kind.
To Blend With¶
You’re not being critical — you’re being accurate, and I’m glad you flagged it.
Yes: in the way you’ve now arranged things (with the museum contact already happening by the end of Scene 23 / into your new “Sharl” tag-on), my Scene 24 draft accidentally replayed the call instead of treating it as the pressure wave that’s already hit.
So Scene 24 should start after the call has ended and move straight into: numbers → quote structure → anti-martyr correction → “Sharl” locked in stone → print/send → pin.
Below is a clean, forward-moving replacement Scene 24 (Celeste POV), with no repeated phone call — only the aftermath.
Scene 24 — The Numbers (Celeste POV, revised: after the museum call)¶
The speakerphone had gone quiet, but the room hadn’t.
There was a particular kind of silence that arrived after a consequential call—not the relief kind, not the “we did it” kind. The kind where you can feel the future step into the doorway and start taking measurements.
Wardrobe at 7:30am didn’t let you pretend you weren’t afraid.
The fluorescent lights made everything tell the truth: chalk dust embedded in the table’s grain, a scuff mark on the lino where someone had dragged a mannequin stand too fast, the faint ring of a mug that had been set down without a coaster because nobody had time for aesthetics when the day was trying to eat you.
The central table was cleared like an operating surface.
Ledger. Invoices. Swatches. A cheap calculator with one cloudy button. The laptop—worn keys, sticker half peeled—open to a spreadsheet that was already too tidy to be comforting.
Lauren exhaled softly, coffee cup held like a life raft. “Well,” she said, and her humour was a small mercy. “That’s grown-up money.”
Mara didn’t move. “Numbers,” she said. “Now.”
No celebration. No spiralling. Work.
She slid the invoice stack toward me as if she were sliding a scalpel across a tray. “Materials. Hardware. Overhead.”
Then she tapped the ledger with one blunt finger. “Labour. Use the ledger. Not optimism.”
The ledger sat open to the doctrine we’d forced ourselves to live by:
Discomfort is data. Pain is failure.
I sat down, pulled the invoices closer, and made myself look at them the way a doctor looks at a chart: without flinching, without romance, without wishing the patient were someone else.
Across from me, Sharl was already seated, laptop angled so I could see. He didn’t try to take the table over. He didn’t speak unless he had something measurable. He simply... held the infrastructure steady, like that was what he was built for.
Which was, of course, exactly what made it dangerous.
Not dangerous in a melodramatic way—dangerous in the way women had been quietly damaged for generations: by being competent, by being useful, by making things smoother until “smoother” became expected and then became invisible.
I’d started to depend on that steadiness. Not emotionally—at least not in the sentimental way people meant when they said “depend.” In the practical way that mattered more. In the way my day ran better because he was there.
And the thought that kept visiting me—uninvited, clinically accurate—returned as I sorted invoices into piles:
Wife.
Not lace. Not performance. Wife as function. Wife as support labour that keeps the ship afloat while someone else gets to stand at the bow and talk about vision.
Only... in this story, I was the person with vision.
Which meant I had a responsibility that most people in power avoided: to notice support before it disappeared into habit, and to keep it from becoming a trap.
Lauren leaned in, voice warm but firm. “Don’t forget documentation time,” she said. “Care instructions. Repair terms. That’s labour too.”
“I won’t,” I said, and I wrote it down as a line item because that’s how we made invisibility illegal: we priced it.
Mara watched me write, her gaze sharp, not unkind—just uninterested in my feelings if they weren’t useful. Her severity was its own kind of protection. It didn’t allow exploitation to hide behind politeness.
I started speaking out loud because I could feel the room tightening, and naming the structure kept panic from turning into theatre.
“Okay,” I said. “We build a quote that can survive procurement.”
I made headings on a fresh page.
Materials:
- fabric, boning, thread, hardware
- wastage (based on actual cutting, not guesswork)
Labour:
- construction hours
- fitting bundle
- documentation/care instructions
- rework allowance (ledger-based)
- repair allowance (realistic wear)
Terms:
- deposit schedule
- scope inclusions/exclusions
- repair turnaround (explicit)
- wear/care obligations (written)
The moment I wrote fitting bundle I felt something inside me settle. This was the difference between “we’ll work it out” and “we know what we’re doing.” Between craft and scale.
Sharl spoke softly, sliding the laptop a few centimetres closer. “I’ve got the rework averages from the last three weeks,” he said. “Stays only. Broken down by cause.”
He’d already separated pattern faults from body-type mismatch. He’d flagged outliers. He’d done it the way he did everything: as if precision was a form of respect.
Mara leaned over, scanned the numbers, and nodded once.
Then, without thinking—without ceremony—she said, clipped and procedural:
“Sharl. Put that variance figure into the allowance line. And add a note: body-type category.”
The room went still for half a second.
Not because the work had stopped. Because Mara had said it.
Lauren’s mouth twitched into a grin she tried to hide behind her coffee cup. Sarah, hovering near the doorway, made a small, delighted sound like a kettle beginning to sing.
Mara’s eyes narrowed as she realised what she’d done—annoyed, not embarrassed. Annoyed as if her mouth had been influenced by something frivolous like other humans.
She did not correct herself.
That was what made it permanent.
Sharl blinked once. A faint flush rose, then faded. He didn’t make it a moment. He just nodded and typed.
“Okay,” he said mildly. “Done.”
Sarah’s grin turned sharp. “Set in stone,” she whispered, as if she were announcing a verdict.
Mara gave her a look that could cut leather.
Sarah lifted her hands in mock innocence, still smiling. “What? You said it.”
Lauren’s eyes met mine for a second—fond, amused, but also quietly approving. A little softness, granted without turning into theatre.
I returned to the invoices because if I let myself linger on it, my thoughts would drift right back to the more important softness I was trying not to mishandle: Sharl’s support, my dependence on it, and the boundary conversation I was going to have to initiate.
Tonight, I told myself, and the word “tonight” felt like an operational task, not romance.
I would have to say it plainly: support is welcome, but it is not a currency. Provider fantasies do not buy authority. Not at work, not at home.
The numbers kept moving.
I pulled material costs, wrote them down, and watched them multiply with rude indifference. Linen didn’t care about our ethics. Hardware didn’t care about our ideals. Thread didn’t care about my future.
Then I moved to labour, and this was where Wardrobe’s cruelty became mercy.
We didn’t guess. We had the ledger.
We had entries for fitting time, rework time, retest time. We had failure points mapped like injuries. We had the proof of our standards.
Lauren leaned in again. “Deposit schedule,” she reminded me.
“Deposit on acceptance,” I said. “Second payment at first delivery. Final payment on completion.”
“Good,” Mara said. “No chasing.”
Sharl’s fingers moved quickly, turning my spoken structure into clean document language. He did it in a way that never felt like he was taking over—more like he was translating me into something procurement could sign without fear.
And then—right on cue—his old reflex tried to crawl out.
“If we keep the margin low,” he said cautiously, “we might look more—”
“No,” Mara cut in, immediate as a slammed drawer.
Lauren didn’t raise her voice, but her warmth sharpened into steel. “No cheapening the work. No martyr maths.”
Sharl’s mouth opened, then closed. His jaw tightened as if he were swallowing something older than this room.
He looked at me—quietly—like he wanted permission to do what his instincts told him was “good”: take more weight, absorb more strain, buy belonging with self-sacrifice.
I kept my voice calm. Not gentle like pity. Calm like governance.
“If we underquote,” I said, “we teach them our skill doesn’t cost. Then the next job expects the same lie. That’s how shops die.”
He nodded once, cleanly. No sulk. No shame performance.
“Right,” he said.
I felt the relief hit me like air in lungs.
He could be corrected.
Which meant I had no excuse not to correct him when it mattered.
Mara scanned the draft quote on the laptop and circled a line with her pen. “Repair clause,” she said. “Make turnaround explicit. Forty-eight hours. Not ‘as soon as possible.’ ‘As soon as possible’ is where liars live.”
I edited it. Typed the words. Felt them lock.
Lauren nodded. “That will keep you alive.”
I read the quote once through—slow, careful. It looked almost boring.
Which meant it was strong.
“Send it,” Mara said.
I attached it to an email, typed the subject line, and before I hit send I forced myself to add a short paragraph of assumptions and scope boundaries. Not to be fussy— to be clean.
Then I pressed Send.
The moment the email left, something in the room eased. Not relief. More like the pressure shifting from immediate to ongoing.
Mara didn’t do emotion, but she did ritual in her own way.
“Print,” she said.
The printer whined and spat the pages out, slow and stubborn. Mara took them, crossed to the corkboard above the ledger, and pinned the quote up with the same brutality she pinned defect reports.
Proof. Record. No sentimental fog.
She stood there a beat longer than necessary, eyes on the paper, as if she were checking that reality had stayed nailed in place.
Then she turned back to us.
“Now,” she said, and if this were a different story it might have sounded triumphant. Here it was simply consequential. “Now we can afford standards.”
Lauren lifted her cup toward me in a small salute. “Crown earned,” she said lightly, making it a joke so I wouldn’t turn it into theatre.
I exhaled once. A clean breath.
Sharl closed the laptop halfway, then opened it again, as if stopping work was a language he hadn’t learned.
I watched him for a second and felt that postponed conflict rise again—not as dread, but as responsibility.
He was becoming infrastructure in my life.
And I could already feel how easy it would be to let that happen without naming it, without pricing it, without guarding him from being caught in the thankless role women had been caught in for centuries.
I would not do that.
Tonight, I promised myself again.
Not romantic. Not tender. Operational. Ethical.
Tonight I would outline it clearly: support is welcome, but self-sacrifice is not a currency; and provider fantasies do not steer our household, our work, or my future.
I gathered the invoices into a neat stack because tidying was how I told my nervous system we were still in charge.
“Next step,” I said, practical again. “We open a new ledger section: ‘Museum Run.’ We log assumptions, and we set a build schedule. No heroics. Just repeatable work.”
Mara nodded. “New heading. New standards.”
Lauren smiled. “And a new kind of pressure.”
Sarah, still hovering, grinned sharp enough to be affection. “Sharl,” she said, pleased with herself, testing the name again like a stitch. “You ready for your empire?”
Sharl blinked at her, then looked back at the laptop as if the question were mildly irrelevant.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s... just work.”
In his head, I could almost hear it—dry and unbothered:
Sharl. Fine. Short for Charlemagne. Emperor. Busy. Next.
And because he didn’t make it a thing, it stopped being a thing.
That was how Wardrobe did it: small human accidents becoming systems—clean, repeatable, and strangely kind.
I looked once more at the quote pinned above the ledger.
Not flowers.
Not romance.
A document, brutal in its plainness.
Proof that somebody had done the boring thing correctly.
And in that fluorescent honesty, I felt the pivot: craft into shop, shop into scale, scale into consequences.
The world wouldn’t care how we felt about it.
So we’d make sure we were ready.
If you’d like, Scene 25 can open with the tiny domestic beat you mentioned earlier: Celeste catching herself about to say something debt-creating (“I don’t know what I’d do without you”) and instead choosing a sentence that sets up the boundary talk (“This works because we keep it clean. I’ll talk to you tonight.”).
Scene 5¶
✨ Second Day ✨¶
[Publish]
Scene 5 ✨ Second Day ✨
[Celeste POV] [Celeste]
The first week was friction finding new places to hide. Charlie had moved in on a Tuesday. By Friday, it was obvious the house was either going to become a second worksite — clean, repeatable, calm — or it was going to dissolve into the kind of domestic mush that eats ambition by the tablespoon.
I wasn’t sentimental about it. I was annoyed.
Annoyed that something as stupid as a dish left on a bench could pull my attention away from a paragraph that mattered. Annoyed that my brain, when it got tired, started inventing stories about other people’s motives. Annoyed, mostly, that I couldn’t afford to waste time being vague.So I did what I always did when something mattered: I made it measurable.
The terms sheet lived on the kitchen bench, clipped to a board like a work order: not because anyone needed reminding, but because in my house, the rules didn’t live in someone’s mood. They lived on paper. The whiteboard became the real hinge. Two cards sat propped against the marker tray.
Cardboard, black marker, painfully literal: IN SESSION.
AVAILABLE.
Charlie had made them.
“You didn’t have to,” I said one morning, reaching for my mug.
“I know,” he replied. “It’s just... easier.”
I realised something that week: Charlie’s support instinct wasn’t emotional; it was mechanical. He reset rooms the way some people reset their posture. Not for applause or closeness: for equilibrium.
I could live with that. I could even grow accustomed to it, if I wasn’t careful.
A text came in while I was still standing at the counter.
Lauren.
How’s the house?
Is he behaving?
I snorted.
Charlie glanced up. “What?”
“Your mother thinks you’re a puppy.”
His ears coloured. “She... she worries.”
“She’s a mum... she’s allowed,” I said with a smile. Lauren wasn’t meddling: just reminding us guardrails existed.
I typed back:
House is fine. He’s quiet. We’re not improvising.
A second message arrived almost immediately:
Good. Keep it boring. Boring is safe.
I showed Charlie the message.
He read it and exhaled softly.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Boring.”
“Exactly.”
I took my tea into my room and shut the door.
IN SESSION.
Three hours went by in a narrow, clean channel. My mind warmed up. The words stopped fighting me. That beautiful thing happened where your brain stops negotiating with the world and starts moving through it. When I came out again, the card on the whiteboard had been flipped.
AVAILABLE.
Charlie sat at the kitchen table with a notebook open, drawing boxes. Not sketches of clothes. Boxes. He looked up, startled, then embarrassed, as if he’d been caught doing something childish.
“What’s that?”
He hesitated, then pushed it toward me.
“It’s... a checklist.”
“A checklist for what?”
“For the museum run.”
My chest tightened with recognition. The work followed him home the way it followed me. That was the strength of it... and of him.
He tapped the page.
“Hardware packs,” he said. “Cut order. QC points. Delivery labels. Like mum said. To stop bleeding time.”
I studied his boxes and felt a grudging admiration. It was practical.
“This is good.”
Charlie blinked. “It is?”
“Yes,” I replied. “It’s clean.”
His shoulders dropped, visibly relieved that someone was naming his work as work and didn’t turn it into a story about him.
A knock came at the front door. It was Lauren, with a tote on her shoulder, cheeks flushed from the heat, looking like she’d fought traffic and won. The kind of woman who’d learned, with Roger, that you don’t wait for a man to stabilise a household: you build your own scaffolding and keep going. She saw the notebook immediately.
“Ah,” she said, and smiled: proud in a quiet way. “Look at that.”
Charlie went pink.
Lauren set her tote down and began unloading it: a roll of tape, a packet of labels, a small box of grommets. It was like she couldn’t enter a room without bringing its next solution.
“Mara rang,” Lauren said, and her tone shifted. “Museum’s confirmed pick-up windows. They want reliability. Not ‘sometime Friday’. Proper time slots.”
Charlie’s pencil hovered over his checklist.
“Can we do that?”
Lauren’s smile turned sharp.
“Yes,” she said. “If we stop making it up as we go.”
Mara’s voice came through Lauren even when Mara wasn’t here. I felt an irritation rise: not at the pressure, at the stupidity of the world requiring women to be twice as organised to be taken half as seriously.
Lauren looked at me.
“You’ve got Uni paperwork to do,” she said. “Applications, fees, the whole circus.”
“Yes,” I replied, already feeling tired.
“We need to protect your hours.”
Charlie’s head lifted.
“You mean—” he started, then stopped himself.
Lauren’s eyes flicked to him: warm, but not soft.
“I mean,” she said, “that if Celeste is doing this, she does it properly. And if you want to be useful, you be useful in ways that don’t steal time from Celeste.”
Charlie nodded, as if he’d been handed a specification.
“Yes, mum.”
Lauren leaned in beside him.
“Show me the checklist, Charlie.”
I watched them for a moment: the mother who did adulthood like a craft, and the boy who learned to breathe when rails appeared. Two kinds of steadiness, related but not identical. Just then my phone buzzed.
A message from Mara.
Tomorrow. 7:30. Museum call. Bring the numbers.
I stared at the words and felt the future click into place. As a workload. As a shop. As a life that would either be governed... or would take whatever it wanted. I put the phone down and picked up a pen. If Mara wanted numbers, she’d get numbers. And if my study hours were going to survive the museum run, then the house would stay boring. Not because I was controlling: because I was serious. Charlie looked up from the checklist.
“Do you want me to stop,” he asked, careful, “when you’re writing?”
I met his eyes.
“No,” I said. “Just no extra chatter.”
He nodded. For the first time, I understood the real shape of what was happening. It had been clear from the outset that Charlie wasn’t moving into my life as a romantic gesture. What wasn't clear at first, but became increasingly apparent was that he was moving into it like a support structure. My focus was to make sure the beam didn’t start thinking it was the roof.
“Good.” I tapped the whiteboard. “Available,” I added. “For ten minutes.”
Charlie’s mouth twitched: he almost allowed himself a smile.
“Ten minutes,” he echoed. Lauren laughed softly.
“My stars,” she said affectionately. “You two are a couple of weirdos.”
I didn’t deny it. I set the timer on my phone, sat at the table, and watched them continue to draw boxes. Work, at least, was something we all understood.And boredom — sweet, structured boredom — was how we were going to survive.