Page 23 of What Maple Heard

“Maple,” she said. “You’d have to be completely blind. This man loves you. Can’t you see that?”

I stood there and watched him mop.

Why was he doing this? What did he want from me? What could he possibly have thought was going to happen?

And the audacity?

The absolute, staggering, unbelievable audacity of this man, who was standing in my studio in his client-meeting shirt, mopping a floor and humming, after fucking me over literally and figuratively. Like everything’s fine, like we’re fine.

Well, nothing’s fine, and I’ll make sure he regrets his very decision of volunteering in my dance studio.

I picked a water bottle from the chiller and went back to my kids.

Behind me, Cade kept humming.

***

Chapter 7

Cade

I’d done some hard things in my life, and succeeded at them.

Not to brag, but I have. I bought a dying company that my entire finance team and my own father told me was a terrible idea. I bought it anyway. I put in the work. Two years later it was the most profitable acquisition in Sonnenberg Group history. I walked into rooms full of people who wanted me to fail and I walked back out with exactly what I came for.

My whole life, I understood one thing clearly: if you want something badly enough, and you work hard enough in the right direction, you will see results. That’s not arrogance. That’s just math.

This was the first time the math was not working.

Two weeks of showing up before anyone else. Two weeks of sweeping and mopping every floor in Happy Steps before Maple arrived, of having her coffee ready before she came through the door, of doing every job Nancy gave me without complaint, including the one that involved a glue gun and sixty-seven pompoms. Two weeks of watching the door every morning thinking: today. Today her face will be different.

Every single morning it was the same.

She came in. She said thank you for the coffee and the clean floors. And then she went into the studio and the door closed and that was the end of Maple’s interaction with Cade for the day.

I wasn’t exactly working with a lot here.

The kids, at least, were coming around.

Marcus had been the first real breakthrough. I’d found him one afternoon sitting against the wall watching the others dance, his arms crossed, doing the full statue impression. I’d been trying to fix a loose bolt on the studio door that had been driving Nancy insane for a week, and I went over to him.

“You’re good with your hands?” I asked.

He looked up. “What?”

I held out the screwdriver. “This bolt. I can’t get the angle right.”

He stared at the screwdriver for a second like it might be a trick. Then he took it. He went at the bolt with focused energy. When the bolt was screwed within forty seconds, he looked at me and smiled. He had definitely done it before and he understood tools in the way some kids understood math or music.

“You’re good,” I said. I meant it.

He shrugged. But he didn’t walk away.

I asked Maple the next day if Marcus and I could work on the large oak tree prop together — the centerpiece of the performance. The tree required various mechanical branches that would open and close and that would require a pulley strong enough to lift Olivia, the twelve year old “Oak Tree Fairy” up through the branches. It was a real engineering problem and I needed a real partner.

Maple had looked at Marcus, who was trying very hard to look like he didn’t care either way.

She shrugged . I took it as a yes. Marcus and I had been working on the pulley system every day since. He was quiet, almost always. I tried conversations and mostly got single-word answers, but he showed up every day and he worked with total concentration, and I had learned that some people communicated better with their hands than their words and Marcus was one of them.