Owen Price had a talent for being liked. He ran the local community center the way other people ran small gardens: he loved the messiness of volunteers and weeds, the sudden, bright flowers of enthusiasm, and the stubborn, patient rituals. He was not a tidy man in the abstract; he preferred lists, but his lists preferred to live on sticky notes that escaped into pockets, shoe soles and the backs of library chairs. In the town where the center sat—on a cheerful corner between a bakery that smelled permanently of cinnamon and a laundromat that played the same mixtape of old hits all day—Owen was both the busiest person and the most easily distracted. He loved the cacophony: the knitting club gossiping about a lost mitten, the afterschool orchestra arguing over umbrella placement, a teenager learning to juggle but mostly throwing a pair of oranges instead. That afternoon, before he had opened the front door, the center had already become its usual kind of small, manageable chaos: a delivery of folding chairs took longer to unwrap than expected; a volunteer argued passionately about where to hang a banner; two teenagers debated whether the vintage popcorn machine was an exhibit or a hazard. He liked coming early, not because he liked the early part but because it meant he could watch things arrive and, in his mind, rearrange them into a kind of map of how the afternoon might go: where the buffet should be, where the kids' table would sit, where the magician would need clearance for dramatic exits. That morning, there had been three calls about the schedule, each handled with a cheerful promise to sort everything out, and then a sticky note added to a bulletin board that started a chain of assumptions. That sticky note read: 'RETIREMENT RECEPTION - GRETA - 3PM' which was honest and straightforward. Someone else had written below, 'MAGIC SHOW - BRUCE - 3PM' in a shaky script that suggested excitement and possibly caffeine. A third note, in neat handwriting with a smiley face, declared, 'CAT ADOPTION FAIR - 3PM' and someone had taped a paw print sticker beside it.