Madison Blake's Arc

Chapter 6 of 7

Madison drove with the invoice folder still on the passenger seat. Sixty-two dollars. Twenty-eight hours. No vendor would cut an invoice fast enough for the bank to release a dime, and the bank was the only door to her money. She pulled into the hardware store lot before she had a plan. Inside, she walked the lighting aisle twice. The daylight bulbs sat on the third shelf in a clear plastic sleeve of three. Bright glass. Clean filaments. The price tag read fifty-four dollars and change. She counted the sockets in the vanity from memory. Six sockets. Two sleeves. One hundred and eight dollars before tax. She stood in the aisle and did the math again. She could not buy what Scarlett required. She could buy half. Madison carried one sleeve to the register. The clerk scanned it. Fifty-seven dollars and eleven cents. She paid with her personal debit card, not the business account, and signed the slip with a hand that did not shake. She kept the receipt. Back at the club, she climbed to the dressing room and set the sleeve on the vanity beside the glove. She unscrewed the six warm-white bulbs and lined them on the counter. She opened the sleeve. Three clear bulbs. She screwed them into the three center sockets, the ones that framed the mirror where Scarlett would sit. She left the outer three sockets empty and taped a small note under the mirror: outer bulbs on order, arriving Friday. She flicked the switch. The middle of the mirror bloomed white and clean. The edges stayed dark. It was not what the contract said. It was what sixty-two dollars bought. Harper found her on the vanity stool. Harper looked at the mirror, at the three empty sockets, at the note. "You paid personal," Harper said. "I paid personal." "That's not how we agreed to run this." "I know." Harper closed the ledger under her arm. "She'll see the gaps the second she sits down." "She'll see daylight where her face goes. The rest I'll handle when she asks." Harper did not argue further. She wrote the personal expense on a sticky note and pressed it to the vanity edge, a reminder that the club now owed Madison money it did not have. Madison stayed after Harper left. She picked up the glove and moved it one inch to the right, so it sat clean in the daylight. Then she went downstairs to wait for the headliner who would arrive in the morning and count sockets before she counted anything else.