Daily Dispatch

You fall asleep sometime after two, phone still in your hand, the last thing on the screen a message from Fiorella that just says go to sleep. the chair will still be there tomorrow.

It's the first time since the party that you sleep more than an hour.

In the morning there's another text waiting, sent at 6:40.

daily dispatch: you are the most talented person in this zip code and my sister has the taste of a hotel lobby. eat something that isn't coffee.

You read it twice. You don't mean to smile, and you do anyway.

The next day there's another one. And the day after that.

daily dispatch: Lie #1 going around the farmers market is that you "never finished anything." you built the table she ate her engagement dinner off. moving on.

daily dispatch: a woman at the bakery asked if I was "the sister who left with him." I said yes. she bought me a scone. the people are with us, Sawdust.

daily dispatch: Lie #4: that you "owe her money." I'm going to need a minute before I type anything else.

She calls you Sawdust now. You don't remember agreeing to it.

She also keeps showing up. Not every day, never long, always with an excuse. A delivery to a wedding at the Grove Park that "happens to go right past the river." A bucket of eucalyptus she needs to "store somewhere cold for an hour," which is a lie because your shop is not cold and she knows it. On Wednesday she brings two sandwiches and eats hers sitting on your lumber stack with her boots dangling, and she makes Thorsten laugh so hard he has to turn off the planer.

She never stays more than an hour. She never touches you. She's careful, you realize, the way you're careful with a board that has a check running through it: she knows where the crack is and she isn't putting any weight there.

You notice everything about her that week, and you hate yourself a little for it. Her sister just broke your life in half on a stage. You shouldn't notice that Fiorella hums when she trims stems, or that she has a scar on her thumb from a florist knife, or that when she laughs, the whole shop seems to get brighter by a few watts.

Thorsten notices you noticing.

"Don't," you tell him.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

"I was going to say," Thorsten says, feeding a board through the jointer, "that she drove you home at midnight in a party dress and has been here every day since, and her dad's the scariest man in Buncombe County. That's all. Just an observation. About a fact."

You throw a rag at him.

On Thursday a letter arrives by certified mail. Plain cream envelope. A law firm in Charlotte you've never heard of.

Our client, Ms. Celandine Ashbury, requests that you cease all contact with her and with members of the Ashbury family, including but not limited to Mr. Alton Ashbury, Mrs. Heloise Ashbury and Ms. Fiorella Ashbury...

You read it standing by the mailbox. Then you read it again.

...any personal property of yours remaining at the residence on Kimberly Avenue has been returned. Items purchased during the relationship, including furniture, remain the property of our client.

Items purchased. As if she bought the Ridgeline at a store. As if you didn't steam-bend every piece of it by hand.

When Fiorella comes by that afternoon you hand her the letter without a word. She reads it on the loading dock with the river going by behind her and her face goes from pink to white to a color you've never seen on a human being.

"Including me?" she says. "She had her lawyer put my name in a letter?"

"Apparently I'm not supposed to talk to you."

"Apparently I'm a member of the Ashbury family." She folds the letter into a tiny, vicious square. "That's news to me after this week."

Her phone buzzes. She looks at it, and her mouth goes flat.

"Dad," she says. "Voicemail. He's been calling every day." She hesitates, then hits play and holds it out so you can hear.

Fiorella. Alton's voice, booming even through the tiny speaker. I know where your van has been parked. Half of Asheville knows. You are making your sister a laughingstock, and you are making yourself one. That man is finished in this town. Whatever you think you're doing, stop it. You have a business in my building. Think about that.

The message ends.

Neither of you says anything for a while. A heron lifts off the riverbank and flaps away low over the water.

"Your studio," you say.

"Is fine."

"He just threatened it."

"He threatens things. It's like weather." She stuffs the phone in her flannel pocket. Her hands aren't quite steady. "I'm not stopping, Ethan. If that's what you're about to say, don't."

"I'm about to say you don't owe me anything."

"I know I don't." She looks at you, and there's something in her green-gold eyes you can't read. "That's not why I'm here."

Before you can ask what is, Thorsten shouts from inside.

"Hey! Ethan! Fiorella! Get in here. Now."

He's at the office desk with the shop laptop, the one you use for invoices. His big shoulders are hunched toward the screen.

"I was looking up the Expo deadline," he says. "Like you asked. For the fall show. And this came up."

The Blue Ridge Design Expo is the biggest furniture show in the Southeast. Every October, buyers from New York and Atlanta and Chicago come to Asheville for four days, and the Maker of the Year award can turn a one-man shop into a business with a waiting list. You've been planning to launch the Ridgeline line there for two years. You were going to apply next month.

On the screen is an Instagram post from a verified account. Duvernay Home. You know the name. Luxury furniture out of Charlotte, glossy catalogs, showrooms in four cities, a CEO who's always on magazine lists. They mass-produce things that are trying very hard to look handmade.

The post is dark, moody, expensive. A single spotlight. Smoke. Text across the bottom: THE SUMMIT COLLECTION. Unveiling October 14 at the Blue Ridge Design Expo.

And in the middle of the frame, backlit so it's just a black shape against white, a chair.

A rocker.

"Zoom in," you say. Your voice doesn't sound like yours.

Thorsten zooms.

Fiorella leans in beside you, close enough that her hair brushes your shoulder. Neither of you moves.

It's the curve of the arms. The way they sweep down and out like a ridge line seen from twenty miles away, the shape you redrew forty times until Mordecai finally grunted and said that's it, don't touch it again. It's the angle of the back splat, the one that took you forty failed bends. It's the runners, which taper in a way nobody does, because it's a pain to cut and you only did it because it looked right.

It's not like your chair.

It is your chair.