The Rival's Sin

A selectman lets himself in through the workshop door without knocking and asks a cabinetmaker to shake hands with a Hawthorn. *You expect me to shake hands with a Hawthorn?* Ezra Whitfield keeps his voice flat, his palm braced against the chair leg he has been sanding for the better part of an hour. The mahogany has gone smooth as bone under his touch and he has not noticed the last ten minutes of work. His mind has been elsewhere. On Clara's cough. On the stack of unpaid invoices beneath the till. On the way the morning light through the workshop windows makes every dust mote look like a judgment. The selectman shifts his weight. A nose like a walnut and a watch chain across his belly. The proposal is a joint exhibit, a shared stand, and a public handshake between two families who have not spoken civilly since a patent dispute that killed one of them. Lucas Hawthorn agrees to it before Ezra does, which is the single most irritating thing that has happened to him this year. The selectman lets himself in through the side door without knocking, which tells Ezra everything about how this conversation is expected to go. Harold Peele has a nose like a walnut and a watch chain across his belly, and he has come to propose a public handshake between two families who have not spoken civilly since a patent dispute. What follows: the lie he has built his life on, a house he swore he would never enter, a fall that strips a man of his dignity, a wound hidden behind a window, a debt that cannot be repaid, a night that holds two people, a leash that tightens, and a blade delivered in a whisper. *She'd taken everything of his. His letters, his patent, his memory. But she'd missed this.* *I don't know how to be with anybody. But I know how to be with you. And right now, that's enough.* Historical MM romance between two rival cabinetmakers, a patent dispute that outlived the men who started it, a sister with a cough and no money for a doctor, a public exhibition that becomes a public reckoning, an ending both men have to fight the period itself for.