Natalie's smile was a soft curve. "Mhm." She crossed the threshold with Oakley, and they carried the boxes in together.
Inside, cardboard peeled open in a papery hush. Natalie handed her a pair of scissors, and the two of them crouched side by side, trimming stray threads from each new piece. No matter how well something is made, there are always one or two loose ends that slip past. You learn to check, to make it right with small, patient cuts.
Oakley had never done this kind of work, but she didn't find it tedious. If anything, it felt oddly wholesome, almost playful. Before long she was humming under her breath, the rhythm lining up neatly with the snip-snip of steel on fiber.
Natalie glanced over, amused. "What happened with you? You're awfully cheerful."
Oakley blinked. "I'm not always like this?"
"Not like this." Natalie shook her head, folding a finished blouse with precise palms. "You look… especially happy today."
Oakley couldn't help it; Grace rose in her mind like light through a sheer curtain.
It felt, suddenly, as if her breath and pulse had been threaded to Grace's hands. A word and she rose. A silence and she fell. How ridiculous, she thought, and how unwise—and how true. She sighed at herself, staring straight ahead. "Nat, can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
Oakley opened and closed the scissors, snipping the air while she gathered courage. "Say there's someone who is… very beautiful. Kind, too. Quick to learn. Brilliant in the way that makes you a little afraid. She treats everyone else strictly by the book, but when it comes to you, she notices everything. She arranges things perfectly, quietly, as if your life were a room she keeps tidy without being asked. And when she looks at you, she gives you her best smile…"
Oakley pressed the cool handle to her chest. "Would you say she… might be into you?"
She was smiling as she said it, eyes and mouth both trying to hide what they couldn't. Her lips nearly forgot how to close.
It was not a riddle. Natalie heard the name behind every pronoun.
"What I can say for sure," Natalie began—she was a careful speaker by nature—"is that she respects you. She likes you. When people dislike someone, they avoid them without realizing it. When they feel nothing, they simply don't pay attention. But when they have affection? They come closer. They consider you."
Oakley sat with that, smiling wider, as if the words were a cup of something warm.
"And if a person like that… pursued you," she pressed on, "even you would feel it, right? You'd be moved. That would be normal, right?"
"You mean me?" Natalie tugged at the corner of her mouth. "It's been a long time since I felt anything like that for anyone. People have been good to me since, but… it's as if that part of me fell asleep and never woke up."
Oakley's jaw slackened. She couldn't keep from asking, gently, "What happened to you, Nat? You always sound so… finished with love."
"It's nothing." Natalie shook her head. "I just don't have much to say about it anymore."
They clipped the last loose end. Natalie stood, collected the scissors, and set the clothes in careful stacks, each piece squared to the edge.
By noon, across town, Grace had cleared her morning's fires and let her shoulders loosen. The moment her mind released its grip, her hand reached for her phone on its own. She opened her feed on apptalk—another habit she didn't remember forming. Any spare minute and she was checking if Oakley had posted something, anything. Even the most ordinary crumbs of thought, Oakley's throwaway lines and photos of the sky, felt inexplicably worth reading.
Nothing today. No new crumbs. Probably with Natalie, Grace thought. The idea made her exhale.
She grabbed her coat and headed for the cafeteria.
At the counter, her hands moved toward the usual tomato-and-egg before pausing midair. She wanted something else. She just didn't know what "else" was.
She took a slow lap and ended up ordering dishes Oakley liked: lemon-poached fish, a small plate of stir-fried tofu, a bowl of green-vegetable-and-meatball soup. The tray felt almost companionable in her hands. She chose a quiet table, sat, and her phone buzzed.
Sabrina Myers:"My friend's getting married and I'm picking a gift. Which of these gold pieces looks best?"
Images fired across the screen—necklaces big enough to have their own gravity. Grace's first thought was of old-school tycoons and overlit hotel lobbies. The second was desert palaces and oil kings.
Committed to never harming a friend by enabling their worst ideas, she typed:"Personally? A bit over the top. And a bit… tacky."
Sabrina:"Okay, ouch. Could you maybe, I don't know, cushion the blow for my fragile heart?"
Grace:"Your 'fragile heart' is ten stubborn bulls in a trench coat. If I'm not blunt, you won't hear me."
Sabrina:"God, I want to slap that smirk off your face."
Grace chuckled."Just not my left cheek."
Sabrina:"???"
Grace:"My left side is the pretty side."
Sabrina:"What are you even saying? Your face is symmetrical."
Grace:"Nope. Left. Certified by an authority."
Sabrina:"What authority? Which institution?"
Grace:"Classified."
Sabrina:"Ever heard of the East African Rift?"
Grace:"Yes."
Sabrina:"I would like to throw you into it."
Grace:"Lol. Can't chat. Lunch."
She set down the phone, still smiling—and then caught her reflection in the black glass, and, against all her previous declarations, flipped the camera to the front.
Left side. Left side.
Oakley likes my left side.
She looked longer than she meant to, a private, ridiculous indulgence, then put the phone down for real and picked up her chopsticks.
Two employees slid onto the chairs at the next table—one with sleek, collarbone-length hair and peacock-blue peekaboo highlights; the other with a springy shag of curls. Street-cool, both of them.
"Good afternoon, Ms. Barron!" Blue Highlights beamed.
Curly Hair echoed the greeting.
Grace nodded. "Afternoon."
They fell into their own conversation—until Blue Highlights turned, earnest. "Do you believe in star signs?"
Curly Hair shook her head. "Not really. People are complicated. You can't fit them into twelve boxes."
"I kind of believe," Blue Highlights said, frowning. "Feels scientific to me."
"Scientific?" Curly Hair scooped rice. "That's… generous."
Blue Highlights wavered, then appealed to the nearest adult in the room. "What about you, Ms. Barron?"
Grace considered. "Interesting to read sometimes, but a little… fluffy. I wouldn't say I'm a believer."
She wasn't allergic to the mystical; she just didn't let it grab the wheel. If it crossed her screen, she skimmed it, smiled, and kept moving.
Blue Highlights deflated like a party balloon. "Fluffy? But it's so accurate."
"Psychology," Curly Hair said. "Barnum statements. Vague enough to fit anybody. Right, Ms. Barron?"
Blue Highlights sighed. "Okay, okay—sun signs alone aren't precise. But charts are! Especially composite charts for couples. You can see at a glance if two people are meant to be. I did a synastry read on me and my ex last night—plus a progressed chart—and it explained everything. We were talking past each other, but he's actually as sincere as I thought, just bad at showing it. And get this—my timing indicators said he still loves me, and today… he texted!"
Curly Hair stared as if she were diagnosing an illness. "Eat more walnuts. No matter what your sky map says, he hurt you. That's a fact. What exactly are you hoping for?"
Blue Highlights shoveled rice, muttering. "I just… it feels so accurate. And the time-lord progression says if we keep working, we could actually stay together…"
She glanced between them. "You really don't believe any of it?"
Grace lifted a slice of pickled greens. "If I ever start truly believing? That's probably when I need medication."
Curly Hair shot her a thumbs-up. Then to Blue Highlights: "See? This is why she gets things done. Take notes. Stop casting charts for that trash fire of a man."
Blue Highlights opened her mouth, closed it, and then groaned. "Maybe that's why some people succeed young and I'm still out here playing oracle."
Grace couldn't help laughing—quiet, surprised.
Which only made the two of them stare, delighted.
"What?" Grace asked, suddenly self-conscious.
"Nothing," said Blue Highlights. "It's just… you've been smiling a lot these last couple days. Way more than usual."
"Have I?"
"Definitely," Curly Hair said, decisive.
Grace chewed thoughtfully, the corner of her mouth curving again of its own accord. She didn't comment.
By evening, she'd cleared her desk earlier than expected—a small mercy. She'd planned on slogging till nine; seven felt like being released on parole. Maybe it was the thought—steady, persistent—of going home.
Downstairs, she slid into her car, then remembered a few things had run out at the apartment. She turned the wheel toward the market.
A cart at the entrance. A quick sweep for staples. Then the bright chill of the produce section.
Her steps slowed at the sight of strawberries—ruby after ruby lined up in their clear boxes, glossy as if they'd been polished one by one. The kind that promised sweetness by simply existing. Oakley loved strawberries. Grace put a box into the cart. Then, reconsidering, three more. In a blink the cart looked like a tiny red field.
She was about to move on when Blue Highlights' lunchtime monologue looped back through her head, stubborn as a jingle. Composite charts. Synastry. Lovers fated by patterns and angles.
Really?
Before she knew it, her stride had thinned to a halt. She forgot her own dismissals. She pulled out her phone as if it had called to her, stared at the blank screen, and then—surrendered.
A download. A pair of profiles, one for her, one for Oakley. Dates, times, the little particulars you're not supposed to care about.
She scrolled until she found the tab marked "Composite."
Her pulse ticked higher. Absurd. But there it was. Nervousness, quick and bright.
What would it say?
She squinted, pressed the button, and the chart bloomed—
—and a hand landed on her arm, light and sudden.
"Grace Barron?!"
Sweet, lilting, unmistakable—Oakley.
Grace spun, face taut.
"So it is you." Oakley squinted at her, then tipped her head closer to the phone, nosy and delighted. "What are you being so sneaky about over here?"
Grace froze where she stood, every muscle turning to stone, as if stillness could make the evidence disappear.
And on the cart between them, the strawberries shone, red as a confession.