Page 34 of Dropping the Ball

“It was a weird angle the first time I saw her,” Micah protests. “I was smitten the second I held her.”

He coos over the pictures for a couple of minutes, and it makes me want to coo over him, but instead, I take my phone back and nod to the pile of rebar nearest us. “Let’s get into it. Talk me through the week.”

“Sure, but I’ll turn Eva loose first.”

I give the welder a professional smile. “Are you ready for this?”

Eva smiles. “Not sure this is the kind of thing you can get ready for. But I’m willing, so that counts for something.”

I tilt my head, shifting to business mode. “Let me rephrase the question. Can you do this, Ms. Herbert?”

Her smile fades, and she gives me a crisp nod. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. I can’t wait to see it.”

With another polite nod, she excuses herself.

Micah keeps his eyes on me instead of watching after Eva. “How are you doing?”

“Great. Excited to dive into this.”

“Feeling . . . rested?”

Ah, there it is. He’s not smiling, but his eyes dance.

I don’t take the bait. “More than Madison. Harper Ivy Mae sleeps all the time, but not all the time at once, and she’s waking her parents up every two hours to eat. She’s fat and happy. Madison is delirious. But also deliriously happy. Now, how about showing me where you’re going to start?”

Micah gives a small smile now, one that feels like it’s more for himself, but he takes the hint and reaches over to pick up a hard hat resting on a nearby stack of empty pallets. “Safety first, then we’ll walk the floor.”

I settle the blue hard hat on my head and refuse to picture how much I look like a Broncos fan wearing it with my orange suit. I also forgot I match the safety poles. This suit will not be making a return visit to the warehouse.

“The point of installation art is to change the perception of a space,” Micah says, leading me to a corner where we can survey the floor. “Technically, that’s the warehouse. A utilitarian commercial building meant for the specific purpose of storage. This will be a multilayered change. Madison’s decision to use it is the first shift in perception.”

I nod. “By changing its function to an event venue.”

“Yes, but it’s more than that. Think about Halloween costumes. Ever see someone you know well in a Halloween costume and think, wow, this whole time I thought he was a law student, but it turns out he’s really a zombie.”

“Definitely.”

The corner of his mouth kicks up. “Is that a lawyer joke?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’ll try again. If I threw on a Wizard of Oz costume right now, would you think, wow, all this time I thought this was Micah, but he was Dorothy all along.”

“Dorothy, hm? I’m not here to judge your choices, but you really just jumped right to Dorothy. Not the Tin Man? Talk to me about your shoe collection. Do you have sparkly red shoes?”

“Kaitlyn . . .” he says, a note of long-suffering in his voice.

“Fine, no. I would not assume you were Dorothy, even if you pet me and call me Toto.” Oh, whoops. I’ve conjured an image of him running his hand over my hair, gentling me.

Micah doesn’t seem to suffer the same intrusive thought, because he moves on. “When you watchedHarry Potter, did you think, ‘That’s Gary Oldman dressed up like Sirius Black,’ or were you just watching Sirius kick butt and take names?”

“The second one.”

“And did you watchBatmanand stop and think, ‘Oh, there’s Gary Oldman again as the commissioner’?”

“I haven’t seenBatman.”

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