The fluorescent lights of Town Hall Conference Room B hummed with a special kind of soulless indifference. Liam Caldwell felt the sound vibrating in his molars.
The room was a monument to bureaucratic blandness: beige walls, a scuffed laminate table, and chairs that seemed scientifically designed to promote poor posture.
He had arrived ten minutes early, a habit ingrained by his grandfather, and had spent the time staring at a water stain on the ceiling that looked vaguely like the state of Delaware. It was the most interesting thing in the room.
He’d brought a single, thin file folder containing a sheet of loose-leaf paper.
On it, in his precise, slightly cramped handwriting, were four words: Bake Sale. Car Wash. Raffle. Book Drive.
These weren’t just ideas; they were pillars of the Havenwood fundraising tradition, tested and true. They were methods that brought people together, face to face, not screen to screen.
They were real.
The door clicked open, and Chloe Maxwell breezed in, bringing with her a gust of air that smelled of expensive perfume and freshly ground coffee. She was a whirlwind of crisp, modern efficiency, from her tailored blazer to the sleek laptop tucked under her arm.
“Liam! So sorry, am I late?” she asked, her smile bright enough to challenge the dreary overhead lighting.
“You’re five minutes early,” he grumbled, not looking up from his contemplation of Delaware.
“Perfect! More time to strategize.”
She set her laptop down with a soft, clinical snap, along with a thick, professionally bound folder emblazoned with a logo he didn’t recognize. She was treating this like a corporate merger, not a fundraiser for a small-town clock tower.
The thought soured the already stale air in his mouth.
Before he could offer a suitably discouraging retort, the door opened again and Mayor Beatrice Thompson bustled in, her presence instantly filling the small room.
“Excellent! You’re both here. I won’t keep you,” she said, her tone leaving no room for argument.
“The preliminary estimate from the restoration company came in. It’s a bit higher than we’d hoped. We need to raise fifty thousand dollars before Founder’s Day, or we risk structural damage that could double the cost. The pressure is on.”
She looked from Liam’s stony face to Chloe’s eager one.
“I know you two will knock it out of the park. Now, I have to go deal with the Garden Club’s petition to declare war on the squirrels. Have a productive meeting!”
With that, she was gone, leaving a heavy, expectant silence in her wake. The fifty-thousand-dollar figure hung in the air between them, an eighty-ton weight.
Chloe broke the silence, tapping a perfectly manicured nail on her folder.
“Okay, fifty thousand. It’s ambitious, but doable. I’ve put together a preliminary proposal with a few scalable ideas.”
Liam felt a muscle in his jaw tighten.
Proposal. Scalable.
It was the language of the city, of the world he and his bookstore stood in defiance of.
“I have a few ideas as well,” he said, sliding his single sheet of paper an inch across the table. It looked pathetic next to her glossy, bound document.
“Great!” Chloe’s enthusiasm felt manufactured. “Why don’t you go first?”
He cleared his throat, feeling a sudden, strange need to defend his simple list.
“These are things that have always worked in Havenwood. We start with a town-wide bake sale in the square. Everyone participates. Mrs. Gable’s lemon meringue pies alone could probably fund a good chunk of the clock’s new hands.”
He pictured it: the checkered tablecloths, the chatter of neighbors, the simple joy of community.
Chloe was nodding, but her smile was tight.
“Okay. A bake sale. Cute. What’s the projected revenue on that?”
“It’s not about revenue,” Liam said, the word tasting like ash.
“It’s about engagement. It gets people invested. Then, we do a car wash with the high school kids, and a raffle. The grand prize could be a basket of goods from all the local businesses.”
He saw her jotting notes, her pen scratching against the paper. He expected her to add to his list.
Instead, when she looked up, her expression was one of polite skepticism.
“Liam, with all due respect, a bake sale and a car wash are not going to raise fifty thousand dollars. Maybe five. On a good day. We need to think bigger.”
“It’s not about thinking bigger,” he countered, his voice low.
“It’s about thinking smarter. These events build goodwill. They remind people what they’re fighting for. It’s the spirit of the town.”
“The spirit of the town won’t pay the contractors,” she said, her tone shifting from patient to pointed. She flipped open her folder, revealing charts and graphs.
“I’ve outlined a three-tiered approach. First, we launch a targeted social media campaign. We create a compelling hashtag—#SaveTheHavenwoodClock—and produce a short, professional video telling the tower’s story. We push it out across all platforms to reach not just residents, but former residents, tourists, anyone with a connection to this town.”
Liam stared at her. He didn’t even have a Facebook page for The Last Chapter.
He considered it a den of iniquity and poor grammar.
“Second,” she continued, undeterred by his stony silence, “we create a tiered corporate and private sponsorship package. Bronze, Silver, and Gold levels, each with its own set of perks: a name on a plaque, a thank-you in the Havenwood Chronicle, a VIP reception at the Founder’s Day festival. We approach the regional banks, the larger businesses in the next county. We give them an incentive to give big.”
The idea of selling off pieces of their town’s history for a “Bronze Level” mention made him physically ill. It was a violation.
“And third,” she finished, tapping a final section of her proposal, “influencer outreach.”
The word landed on the table like a dead thing. “Influencer outreach?”
Liam repeated, the term feeling foreign and ridiculous on his tongue.
“Exactly. I have contacts with several mid-tier lifestyle and travel influencers in the region. We offer them a weekend in Havenwood—put them up at the inn, give them a tour, a great meal—in exchange for a series of dedicated posts about the campaign. Their reach is enormous. One good post could bring in more than ten bake sales.”
He stared at her, at her clean, logical, soulless plan. Each point she made was another brick in the wall between them.
He felt a cold fury rising in his chest. It wasn’t just that her ideas were different; they were an assault on everything he valued about his home.
She wanted to turn their heartfelt community project into a slick marketing campaign. She wanted to sell their town’s soul for clicks and hashtags.
“No,” he said, the word flat and final.
Chloe’s professional mask finally cracked. A flicker of genuine frustration crossed her face.
“No? Just… no? Liam, these are proven, effective strategies. This is how fundraising is done in the twenty-first century.”
“This isn’t the twenty-first century, Ms. Maxwell. This is Havenwood,” he shot back, his voice rising.
“We don’t need ‘lifestyle influencers’ telling us our town is quaint. We live here. We know. And we certainly don’t need to sell sponsorship packages like it’s a new football stadium. This is a monument built by our great-grandparents, not a branding opportunity.”
“This is a fifty-thousand-dollar problem!” she retorted, her cheeks flushing with color.
“I am trying to solve it efficiently. Your plan is based on nostalgia and hope. My plan is based on data and strategy. We don’t have time for a potluck, we need a plan that works!”
The argument had become personal. He saw it in her eyes.
To her, his methods were a sign of his irrelevance, a relic of a bygone era, just like his bookstore. And to him, her methods were a reflection of everything he hated about the modern world—the superficiality, the transactional nature of it all, the obsession with image over substance.
She was the enemy, standing right in front of him, armed with a PowerPoint presentation.
“You don’t get it,” he said, leaning forward, the flimsy table between them feeling like a battle line.
“You just moved here. You see a problem and you want to throw a business plan at it. You don’t understand that how we do this is just as important as getting it done. You want to bring in outsiders and corporations. I want to rely on the people who walk these streets every day. My way builds community. Your way… your way just builds a bank account.”
The accusation hit its mark. Chloe recoiled as if slapped.
Her eyes, which had been bright with passion, now glistened with something else—hurt.
“That’s not fair,” she said, her voice quiet but intense.
“You think I don’t care about community? I left a city where no one even knew their neighbors’ names to build something here. I’m invested in Havenwood. But I’m also a realist. Being stuck in the past isn’t noble, Liam. It’s just a slow way to fail. You’re so afraid of anything new, you’d rather watch the clock tower crumble than admit there might be a better way to fix it.”
Her words cut deeper than he wanted to admit, striking the raw nerve of his deepest fears—that he was failing, that his reverence for the past was just a gilded cage.
He was trying to preserve his grandfather’s legacy, but what if he was just embalming it?
The room fell silent again, the hum of the fluorescent lights now sounding like a judgmental drone. The chasm between them was absolute.
His simple list of community events and her detailed, multi-platform strategy were not just two different plans; they were two different worlds. And there was no bridge in sight.
Chloe slowly closed her glossy folder. Liam stared down at his own sheet of paper, the familiar words now looking hopelessly, pathetically quaint.
The meeting had been a disaster. They hadn’t found a single point of agreement.
They had only succeeded in confirming what they both suspected from the start: they were not partners. They were adversaries, chained together by the well-meaning machinations of a meddling mayor.
And the clock tower, the very thing that was supposed to unite them, now seemed destined to be the battlefield on which they would tear each other apart.