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On opening night in a seaside town, scenic carpenter Ava must save a faltering set with quick hands and a makeshift backbone, then decide whether to accept a lucrative touring offer. The text is steeped in tactile craft, small-town rituals, and the hum of a theatre where choices get hammered into place.
Ava's hands remembered angles before her head did. They found the true line, traced it with a carpenter's pencil as if waking a sleeping joint, and held it steady while her eyes argued with measurements. The Hearthside stage smelled of fresh-cut pine and yesterday's coffee; the dust hung in afternoon shafts of light like a lazy curtain. Music from the bakery on the corner — a tinny accordion that always played the same three notes when the baker was testing the oven — drifted through the open stage door and made the theatre's old radiator clatter an offbeat drum.
She had been awake with the set since dawn, coaxing a rotating platform into behaving like its instructions promised it would. It was the kind of mechanical compromise that required cheek and patience: not brute force, but a sequence of small, exacting choices. Ava clamped, scribed, bored, and checked. She rasped the edge to calm a stubborn tongue and shimmed tiny wedges until the platform sang smooth under her palm. Her toolbox smelled of cedar and machine oil; a magnetized tray kept stray screws from falling into dark places where a ghost of a summer rehearsal might live.
Across the floor, the theatre's resident work-cat, a tabby with one ear nicked and the sort of disdain only a creature who treats stage directions as optional could muster, had appropriated a scrap of sandpaper and was padding it around like a prize. She called it Bolt and, in defiance of all stage superstitions, had sewn him a miniature reflective vest from an old safety banner. Bolt watched Ava as if he were accounting for every tooth in her tool collection.
Ava's phone buzzed in her pocket; she slid it out with the same care she used to withdraw a bit from a tight socket. The message was short and perfunctory, a digital business card: a producer from the city touring company had seen Hearthside's ad and would like a meeting. It did not say please or promise; it said meet. There was a link and a calendar slot marked as a suggestion rather than an invitation.
She let the phone sit face-up on a drop of wood glue while she took three breaths and did what carpenters do when they want to test a plan: she measured again. The tape sang from her hand, the brass end catching on the lip of the platform, and Ava laughed, low and private. There are, she thought, only so many ways to be nervous. This one smelled faintly of pine and possibility.