“Something like that,” Rachel said.
Arthur nodded slowly. He reached into his apron pocket and pulled out a roll of heavy athletic tape. He tossed it onto her workbench. It landed with a soft thud.
“Cherry wood is dense,” Arthur said, turning back toward his machine. “Takes a lot of patience to smooth it out. If your hand’s compromised, you’ll dig the edge of the sander in. Ruin the grain. Tape it tight, or switch to hand sanding for the detail work.”
“I’ll tape it,” Rachel said.
“Take your time,” Arthur said over his shoulder. “We aren’t building a house on fire.”
Rachel picked up the tape. She bit the end off and began wrapping it around her wrist and palm, pulling it tight to compress the swollen tissue. The pressure felt good. It stabilized the joints.
She thought about the man from the diner. She wondered if he’d gone to the hospital. She wondered if the doctor had to wire his jaw shut. She tried to push the thought away, but it lingered—a dark stain on her morning.
She picked up a block of sandpaper with her left hand, deciding to follow Arthur’s advice and start with the manual detail work. She pressed the abrasive paper against the edge of the cherry wood, leaning her body weight into the motion.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
The rhythmic sound grounded her. The smell of the cherry dust rising into the air was sweet and earthy.
She wasn’t a hero. She knew that now. Definitively.
When she was younger, in uniform, the lines had seemed clearer. Bad guys. Good guys. Protect the weak. Eliminate the threat. But the civilian world wasn’t a combat zone. It was just a messy, overlapping web of damaged people bumping into each other in the dark.
The man in the parking lot was an arrogant bully. But she was a weapon—an overpowered, highly calibrated instrument of violence that had been unleashed on a localized petty problem. The disparity of force bothered her. It felt like using a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito on a glass table. The mosquito is dead, but the table is shattered.
She pressed harder into the wood, watching the rough edges slowly begin to smooth out under her steady, methodical strokes.
She couldn’t change what she was. She couldn’t unlearn the angles of vulnerability in the human body or forget how to break a man’s balance before he even realized he was falling. That knowledge was etched into her neurobiology, as permanent as the scar tissue on her ribs.
But as she ran her fingers over the newly smoothed edge of the table, feeling the transition from rough to flawless, she made a quiet promise to herself.
She would keep to the shadows. She would keep her head down, drink her terrible coffee, and sand her wood. She would be the tool, not the weapon—until someone left her no other choice.