Chapter 128: Dom

SIXTY sat at the top of the sheet in bold, which was the most confident thing about it.

Adrian built the columns the way he had for the demo: job number, parts cost, labor, charge, paid, invoice reference. Then he opened the first five folders Tim had dropped off, and his hands stopped over the keyboard.

Folder one was clean. Folder two had an invoice but no job number, just a date and the word "Honda" in Dom’s handwriting. Folder three had a payment note that said "pd 200 + rest 3/14," which could mean paid in full, paid in installments, or a threat. Folder four’s invoice reference didn’t match the binder. Folder five was missing a page.

’Ten was a demonstration.’ He’d picked jobs Dom already trusted. Sixty was the shop as it actually was, and copying the format sixty times would only produce sixty confident mistakes.

Adrian: Do all sixty have their paperwork?

Tim: Most. Older ones, not sure. Some files are thin.

Thin was a polite word for ’you’ll have to ask.’ He didn’t ask for more money. The contract said organize sixty jobs, not invent what the paperwork didn’t say. Anything unverifiable would go on a list, the list would go to Dom, and nobody’s guess would go in the sheet.

Then the clock. Twenty-two hours had been the plan; call it twenty-five now, with Dom’s deadline a week out. He opened his week: lectures, a lab, the clinic follow-up on Monday. He’d penciled forty minutes a night, a fantasy with a calendar attached. He rebuilt it in two-hour blocks, meals marked, bed at eleven, and one evening he refused to name.

Rose came at ten on Saturday with a paper bag and four index cards fanned like a poker hand.

"The shortlist," she said. "Eggs made it."

"Honest eggs?"

"Just eggs." She set them down and stopped. The laptop sat open beside the channel notes: columns, colors, a calendar with too much red. "That’s not a painting."

"It’s a contract. Dom gave me sixty jobs."

He’d braced for a lecture. Instead her face did something quick and bright. "He’s paying you?"

"Seven-fifty."

"That’s real money." She picked up the schedule and read it the way she read zippers. "You counted every hour you could work."

"That’s the schedule."

"It’s the hours you could survive, once. Where do you eat?"

"There’s a meal marked."

"Twelve minutes at your desk." She set it down. "You had a head injury last week, Adrian. You don’t get a hero week."

"I’m not saying hero. I’m saying deadline."

"Same thing, with less applause." She slid a pen across. "Add ninety minutes of nothing. Not ’rest.’ Nothing."

He wrote NOTHING in an empty block like a line on a tax form. It was alarming how much better the page looked.

"Now these." She tapped the cards. "Eggs needs help."

"It has no verb."

"It has a vibe." She turned the card over. "A stranger sent it because they wanted to be in the video. I’m not turning that into a joke."

"So it’s the bonus. Last prompt, no explanation, a title card that says ’submitted by.’"

"That respects them." She said it like a quiet verdict. It was a better rule than anything on his list. He wrote it down.

By two he was inside the first ten jobs, and three of them didn’t fit.

Job four had one supplier invoice under two references, one in the binder, one in the drawer. Same part, same price. He logged both under one row with a note. Job six was worse: "pd 300" on the page, charge $540. Deposit or whole?

Mark it paid and Dom might never chase a customer who owed him two-forty. Mark it unpaid and he’d chase one who didn’t.

He left it blank. He didn’t use yellow, since yellow meant missing invoice, and he wasn’t going to repurpose a color. He built a second tab, EXCEPTIONS, and moved the job there with the question in plain words: deposit or full?

Tim: Dom has to confirm that one. January. He says he remembers, but he also says he remembers wrong sometimes.

Adrian: Ask him tomorrow. Don’t push.

He didn’t like leaving a blank. A blank looked like a failure to anyone who didn’t read the tab name, and he’d learned today that most people didn’t.

Ten jobs took four hours fifty, against three-forty for the demo. The exceptions had cost him seventy minutes. He rewrote the estimate longer and didn’t flinch. A rosy number would only have been a lie he could read.

Jenna’s message arrived at seven, forty seconds after he’d decided dinner counted as a break.

Jenna: Edit structure. Weird prompts first, then the challenge, then Rose.

He read it with a fork in his other hand. Weird prompts, Rose, reactions, reactions, reactions.

Adrian: It’s a pile of reactions. No spine.

Jenna: Thank you for the notes, professor.

Adrian: Open on the challenge. Then the shortlist. Reactions come after the paintings, not before.

Jenna: That puts the paintings in the first thirty seconds. You’d spoil it.

Adrian: The cards. Not the canvases.

The dots appeared and vanished twice. Then: Fine. Cards.

They finished in six messages, which was fast for two people who were both certain. Challenge card, shortlist with titles, Rose hearing the first prompt. No canvas until the reveal.

Jenna: How’s the contract?

Adrian: Longer than I planned.

Jenna: That’s the first honest answer you’ve given a deadline.

Jenna: I’ll take the edit. I’m not taking the schedule.

Adrian: I wouldn’t ask.

Jenna: I know. That’s why I offered.

They split it: she cut, he recorded, Rose painted. When the thread went quiet, it was a good quiet. It didn’t need him to fill it.

Sunday at 4:12 he finished the first ten and sent them to Tim.

Tim took an hour, checking each line against the binder like a man defusing a bomb with a coffee. He found one more: job eight, labor billed at a rate the sheet didn’t list. Adrian had flagged it. They called Dom.

"Forty-five an hour," Dom said, over a compressor. "Went up in February. Put it in."

"Both rates, both dates," Adrian said. "So whoever reads this knows why it moved."

"Whoever reads it can ask me."

"You won’t always be in the room." Dom grunted, which wasn’t a no.

He updated the line and kept the original discrepancy in EXCEPTIONS with a reason and a date. A correction with a reason was a record. Without one it was a rumor.

Ten jobs. Fifty left.

Adrian: Can you group the rest by invoice date?

Tim: Takes me an evening. Done by Monday noon.

He rebuilt the pace: eight a day, six on class days, one real dinner. He stuck the number on the monitor where it could watch him.

Rose came back after dinner with the cards and a clipboard she’d stolen from Jenna.

They settled Saturday at two, after her studio session. When the clipboard was done, she didn’t leave.

"Have you and Jenna kept to it?"

"We’ve talked about the edit. She offered to take it. She also said she wasn’t taking my schedule, and I thanked her." He didn’t blur anything. "That’s all."

Rose listened, thumb along the clipboard’s edge.

"I don’t want to police your messages. I don’t want a report every time you answer a text." She breathed out. "I want to hear it when something touches us. Not sideways."

"I’ll tell you."

He waited for her to say it was fine, because he wanted it. She didn’t. She leaned into his shoulder instead, briefly, and it felt like a decision more than a hug. It was exactly as much as she’d chosen to give, and he didn’t ask for the rest.

"Saturday. Two. Eat something."

"Twelve minutes at my desk."

"I’ll know."

Monday, the old jobs stopped being polite.

They had invoices but no payment status, figures in the margins, a customer’s phone number written over a part number because the paper had run out of room. He worked between classes at the library, third floor, where the carpet smelled like glue and someone nearby was eating noodles with the confidence of a man who’d never been audited. He sorted the jobs onto index cards: READY, WAITING, MISSING. Tim’s date-sorted stack had landed at noon exactly, and it gave the pile edges.

Of the next twenty, eleven were ready, seven waited on Dom, and two were missing everything: no invoice, no note, a repair that existed only in a customer’s memory.

He checked the system once, as a courtesy.

[Pending Opportunity: Corolla Repair — Open]

Nothing new. He closed it. He had eleven jobs he could finish today.

He did. By five: twenty-one done, seven waiting, two missing, thirty untouched. He sent Dom the numbers, no adjectives.

Dom: Job 38. Who wrote the note in the margin? It isn’t mine, and it isn’t Tim’s.

Adrian pulled the file. Along the bottom edge ran a single thin line in blue ink, written in a hand with long, looping tails.

Whoever wrote it had known something was wrong with the job before he had.