The delivery van sold on March 23, three days after the envelopes, to a church outreach program two towns over that needed something to haul folding tables and didn't care that the transmission ground a little going into second gear. I'd bought it used in 2016 with money from the local repair work I did around my custody shifts, before the institutional contract made the shop our full-time livelihood. Watching it pull out with somebody else's magnetic logo taped crooked on the door felt less like a loss than I'd braced for.
"Eleven thousand two hundred," Vera said, counting the check twice at the workbench the way she counted everything twice now, since the sixteenth. "That covers payroll through May if we're careful. Not if we're generous. Careful."
"Careful I can do," I said.
We cut the schedule back to four days a week instead of six, Tuesday through Friday, and posted the new hours on the door in the same marker she used for her parts bins, block letters, no apology in the wording. A few regular customers asked why, standing at the counter with their chairs tilted up on the lift, and I told them the truth in the short version: we'd lost a large institutional contract over a disagreement about what we were willing to put our names on. Nobody pressed for more, which surprised me, though Vera said later it shouldn't have. "People around here know what it costs to say no to something," she said. "They don't need the whole story to recognize the shape of it."
What we didn't do was look for a replacement all at once, no rush contract with Alder Crossing or Sable Junction signed sight unseen just to fill the hole the Rook Harbor deal left behind. Vera was firm about that on the twenty-fifth, standing over the ledger with her arms crossed. "If we jump at the next institution that waves a contract at us, we'll end up right back here in two years, except poorer and more tired. I'd rather be smaller and know what we signed."
"Agreed," I said, and meant it, though some older, hungrier part of me still flinched at the empty line in the appointment book where Millhaven's biweekly service calls used to sit.
On the twenty-seventh we finished Mrs. Oduya's chair, the one that had been waiting on a replacement caster assembly since before any of this started. Vera held the frame while I seated the caster and torqued the bolt down. Mrs. Oduya's daughter watched from the counter and asked whether we'd ever teach families the small checks they could safely do between visits. Vera said we'd think about it. No date, no promise. Then we lowered the chair and watched the wheel turn true instead of wobbling.
"We should write it down," Vera said while I was wiping grease off my hands. "Not the supplement, that's done, that's yours to carry. I mean us. What Voss-Sennett Mobility Repair actually is now, who signs what, who sees contracts before they go out. On paper, not just understood between us."
"You want a partnership agreement," I said.
"I want one where both our names are on every institutional bid from here out, not just yours, so nobody's ever in the position you were in alone, deciding what to put in an envelope at eleven at night with nobody else's eyes on it." She said it without heat, which somehow made it land harder than if she'd been angry. "I'm not blaming you for March. I'm telling you I don't want to find out in six years that there's a March I didn't know about."
"That's fair," I said, and I didn't argue the terms, not the dual-signature clause, not the quarterly review of any contract over a certain dollar figure, not even the part where she'd have final say on anything involving the Custody Standards Review Office by name. We didn't sign anything that week. She said we should sleep on the language first, make sure it said what we meant and not just what we felt on a Monday in March. I agreed to that too, and drove home past the empty space where the van used to sit, smaller, but mine in a way the contract money never quite had been.