Stepdad and His Friends Bred Me During the Birthday Blackout novel · Chapter 6 of 48
Chapter 6: The Post
By Monday morning it had two hundred thousand likes.
By 5 a.m., when I parked at the hospital job in Tempe, it had been shared into every trade group in the Valley.
Nobody in the crew trailer said good morning.
The apprentice I'd trained since March looked at his boots.
One of the drywall guys held his phone up across the trailer so his buddy could see the screen, then saw me and dropped it.
Somebody had stuck a printout of the still on the plan table, with a tack through Abram's face.
Under it, in Sharpie: GROUNDED.
I took it down and folded it into my back pocket.
Nobody laughed. That was almost worse.
My foreman came in at 5:20 with two coffees and handed me one.
He never brought me coffee.
"Walk with me, Renner."
We walked out to the loading dock, where the sun was already coming up orange over the parking structure.
"I'm pulling you off the hospital," he said.
"I didn't do anything on the hospital."
"I know you didn't." He looked at the lid of his coffee. "The hospital's facilities director saw it. The general contractor saw it. The owner's rep called me at home at ten o'clock last night."
"And said what?"
"Optics."
"Optics."
"It's a hospital, Codi. They're scared of their own shadows."
The words went through me.
"I'm a twenty-four-year-old woman," I said. "I met him two years ago. I've never lived in his house."
"I know."
"Then say so to the owner's rep."
He didn't say anything.
"Where am I going?"
"The yard. Sorting the wire returns. Till it blows over."
The wire returns. That was apprentice work. That was punishment work.
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