Cheating.
The idea was so absurd it felt obscene.
He thanked the secretary in a voice that sounded nothing like what he was feeling. Then he ended the call, reached for his keys, and walked out exactly as he was. Flannel shirt dusted pale with sawdust. Jeans. Work boots. No suit. No folder. No preparation except the kind carried in the bones.
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He didn’t change his clothes. Didn’t wash his hands. Didn’t stop to think whether that made him look rough or defensive or poor in the way some people translated hard work into something lesser. He locked the site, got in his truck, and drove through a gray Tennessee morning with his jaw set so tight it hurt.
At a red light near the feed store, he saw a mother in the minivan beside him leaning back to hand a juice box to a little boy in a car seat, and the sight struck him low and hard because Rachel used to do that same backward reach without ever needing to look. She had done a thousand things that way—blindly, accurately, with the easy confidence of somebody who trusted love to make her body remember what mattered.
He tightened both hands on the steering wheel.
Not now.
