Both Sides
of the River

The Sanguine River splits Arden's Reach into two places that share a name. West bank: old money, old university, older grudges. East bank: everyone who actually lives here.

When the university's expansion plan goes public, it arrives as a press release with addresses in it. A gym. A bar. A nursery. A loft full of artists. The buildings have names because there are people standing in them.

Nine women on both banks are about to find out what they will risk—a business, a family, a career, a name they spent years building.

They are also, inconveniently, falling in love. With the appraiser whose report could condemn their building. With the reporter writing about their family. With the person who has been standing across the same bar for four years. With someone who turned up at exactly the wrong moment and stayed.

Some of them find something that holds. Some find out what it costs to ask for it. Not all of them get to keep it.

Six months to decide what is worth saving.

In January the notice gave twelve buildings on Anders Street six months. In February the town is still counting, one number a night, on a whiteboard in a bar where every name was written by the person it belongs to.

A building manager's honest record may become the case against the building he kept standing. A lawyer who left her firm keeps reading a deed nobody else thinks to read. A scientist is measuring a ditch above the one culvert the whole east bank drains through, because somebody upstream has started moving the ground. And an artist whose building was left off the notice has started to believe that means something.

On both banks of the Sanguine River, they keep working, keep loving, and keep count. The hearings are fair. The process works exactly as it was written. That is the problem.

Some of them will win terms. Some will lose a place that cannot be given back.

The notice named the buildings. The river never read it.