Left in the Blizzard: My Twin Stole My Husband, I Rule the City novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Big Screen

I put the contractor's impossible GPS logs on the operations center screen and get walked out with a box, and then the mayor announces the renewal is certified by me.

"Send me that," I said.

Jens looked at me sideways. "The doctor said rest."

"I'll rest after I send it to myself."

He sent it.

My phone died at two percent with the video still loading.

He drove me home to the condo on the hill, blade up, slow, and walked me to the elevator.

"You're going in tomorrow," he said.

"It's Saturday."

"You're going in tomorrow anyway."

"Yes."

He sighed through his nose.

"Your car's in a drift and it's still snowing. I'm on at six. I'll get you at seven."

"You don't have to."

"I know what I have to do, Map Lady. I've been doing it all winter while you redrew my route."

The elevator doors closed on his face before I could think of anything to say.

Anders's half of the closet was already empty.

I plugged in my phone, drank three glasses of water, and lay on the couch with my hand on my stomach.

I watched the video forty times.

At seven the next morning, a plow idled at the curb with its amber lights going.

The snow operations center sits in the city garage on the west side, a long room with no windows.

One wall is a screen.

It shows every street in Duluth, green when it's clear, yellow when it's working, red when it's waiting.

I built that screen.

On a storm Saturday, the room is full.

The dispatcher with her headset and her cold coffee.

Four supervisors.

Drivers off twelve-hour shifts, eating cereal from the box.

Nobody had ever seen Jens Brekke and Map Lady walk in together.

The room noticed.

A driver by the radio desk spoke first.

"You okay, Signe? We heard it on the channel."

The room went quiet in a different way.

They'd all heard it on the channel.

I'm alone, I'm hurt, and I'm pregnant.

"I'm okay," I said. "Thank you."

Then I sat down at my desk and logged into the contractor portal.

Every Thorsby truck carries a GPS unit, because I wrote that into the contract four years ago.

The data comes to us.

Nobody had ever let me check it.

The mayor's office kept the portal password, and it was always "being reset."

It had not been reset.

It was the same password since 2022, and Marit had once left it on a sticky note on my fridge.

I pulled Friday.

Then I pulled December.

It took me twenty minutes to find the first impossible thing.

"Can I use the wall?" I asked the supervisor on shift.

He looked at the screen, then at me, then at Jens leaning by the door with his arms crossed.

"It's your wall," he said.

I put Thorsby unit nine up where the whole city usually is.

A blue line crawled across the hillside streets in the order they were logged plowed.

"This is Friday at two," I said.

The room turned to look.

"Nine starts here, at the top of Ninth Avenue East. Then it's at the bottom of Kenwood. Two minutes later."

Someone whistled.

"That's four miles," a driver said.

"Uphill. In a blizzard. With the blade down." I tapped the speed in the corner. "Sixty-one miles an hour."

Laughter, short and ugly.

I put up December.

Seventeen streets "cleared" between 3:01 and 3:04 a.m. on the twelfth.

A truck that plowed Lakeside and Duluth Heights at the same minute.

Four days when unit nine never left the yard and billed nine hours each day.

Then I put Jens's dashcam next to the GPS line.

The diner. The blade up. 2:10.

And the GPS for 2:10: unit nine, plowing my hill.

Nobody laughed this time.

"That's my street," a driver said quietly. "My mother's on that street."

"That's mine," another said. "My kid's bus turned around three times in December."

The double doors at the end of the room swung open.

Karin's chief of staff walked in with a city security guard behind him.

He was a narrow man with a lanyard and a voice.

He stopped in front of the wall and looked at unit nine for a long second.

Then he turned it off.

"Ms. Thorsby," he said.

"Sandvik."

"Ms. Thorsby, you're on administrative leave effective immediately. Unauthorized access to a vendor portal. I'll need your badge."

"It's the city's portal. I wrote the clause that built it."

"Your badge."

The security guard had already brought a cardboard box.

They'd planned this before I got here.

I unclipped the badge from my parka and put it in his hand.

I packed my desk with everyone watching.

My mug. My radio charger. My photo of the lake in a whiteout.

The pencil from behind my ear.

When I came out into the hallway, the box in both hands, Marit was standing by the vending machine.

Cream coat. Hair curled. Her city hall ID on a pink lanyard.

She'd come with him.

She didn't say anything.

She just watched me carry the box past her, the way she watched the snow from the window seat.

Jens took the box out of my hands at the door.

"I can carry a box."

"I know," he said. "You can also carry three people. Give me the box."

In the cab, his phone in the dash mount was playing the noon news.

Karin stood at a podium in city hall, red scarf, pearls, her back straight.

"Our streets are moving," she said. "And the council will vote on Monday to renew our snow contract."

Monday.

The vote was supposed to be next week.

"The renewal has been fully certified," Karin said, "by our city engineer."

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