Archive of Our Own

Peggy was still about twenty miles out when it began to snow: not picturesque, drifting flakes but wet, dense flurries from a leaden sky. The road grew treacherous, and although the rental company had given her an SUV bigger than some of the apartments she'd lived in, Peggy's back and shoulders soon ached from how tightly she was gripping the steering wheel.

"Looks like we've got some wonderful, festive weather out there right now!" the DJ on the radio chirped. The wipers were struggling to keep the windshield clear. "Another three inches of snow forecast by late this afternoon, and that mercury's just going to keep on falling. Brr! The forecast's calling for nothing but cosy sweaters and hot cocoa this morning, folks, while we keep you cheerful with the very best of the Top 40."

In the privacy of her car, Peggy said something very rude.

Perhaps she shouldn't have been so quick to volunteer for this assignment, Peggy thought, as she steered her tank of a rental car carefully around a sharp, slick bend in the road. She'd been transferred from SSR's London office to the D.C. headquarters ten months ago, which was a mark of approval in itself. Peggy might not yet have a corner office or an executive title, but she'd already been told that her year-end bonus cheque would be hefty and that Phillips had declared her work "not entirely terrible." Peggy Carter was well on her way to making a name for herself with SSR Industries. No one would have openly accused her of not pulling her weight if, instead of heading off on a short-notice business trip, she'd booked a ticket home to see her family for Christmas. Still, there was always the chance that someone might have been thinking it, and it wasn't as if a woman trying to get ahead in this business could afford to pass up any opportunity to prove herself.

So here she was in mid-December, driving down the main drag that led into the tiny town of Cookie Jar, NY. Her first glimpse of the town didn't do much to live up to the whimsical name—or at least, it had as much whimsy as could ever be conjured up by a dollar store, a gas station, a drive-through Starbucks and a seedy-looking pizza place. The GPS's chipper, tinny voice directed her to go as far as the second set of lights, turn right, third left, and then proceed to her destination: Hillview Bed and Breakfast. In this weather, Peggy couldn't really tell if the place lived up to the name, but at least it looked cosy: a large green Victorian house with pale trim, set in a big garden that was steadily disappearing beneath the snow. She parked the car, got her bags from the back seat, and hauled them up the porch steps to where a light was on over the main door.

Peggy didn't have time to knock before the door swung open and she was greeted by a tall man with dark skin and a ready smile.

"Sorry about that," he said, wiping the last of the flour from his hands with a dish towel that he slung over his shoulder before he stooped to pick up her bags. "Normally I'd hear you drive up but we were busy in the kitchen. Welcome to Hillview, come on in."

Peggy followed him into what seemed like a haven of light and warmth after the weather outside. The space must have been designed to impress back when the house was first built—a truly grand entry foyer that was able to hold both the reception desk next to the stairs and a twelve-foot Christmas tree with space to spare. Every bit of wood, from floor to bannisters, was highly polished; the air smelled like pine and beeswax and cloves. Setting her bags down on the floor next to the desk, the man stepped behind it and picked up a tablet computer, which seemed almost jarringly out of place in a room like this.

"I'm Sam, by the way," the man said, tapping the tablet screen. "Do you have a reservation with us?"

"Yes," Peggy said, digging in her handbag for her wallet and ID. "Under Margaret Carter; a single for three nights."

"Oh," Sam said, looking up at her. He hadn't stopped smiling, but his expression now seemed less genuine. "You're with SSR."

Peggy blinked at him. She'd booked the room herself and hadn't given a company name in her reservation. "Do you have a sideline in deductive reasoning as well as work in the hospitality industry?"

"Not that hard," Sam said, accepting the credit card she handed over to him. "New face, driving a car with out-of-state plates, at this time of year, not staying for Christmas or part of a couple, when there's a visit coming from SSR head offices? I can put two plus my reservations list together."

Now Peggy definitely felt nonplussed. No one at the factory was supposed to know of this visit: a surprise inspection wasn't much of one without, well, the surprise. "I—well, yes, that's me. I take it that people are expecting me at the factory, then?"

"Something like that," Sam said, and slid a key across the counter to her.

The room that Sam showed her to was a pretty one: white wainscoting and blue wallpaper, a large and comfortable looking brass bed and a spotless attached bathroom. Peggy took the time and what was surely several gallons of piping hot water to shower away the stress of her journey, and sat on the bed in her robe while she combed the tangles out of her hair and reviewed the paperwork one last time. There was a lot of it. It wasn't that the factory here in Cookie Jar was particularly big, as these things went. It was just that decades of unusual contracts and idiosyncratic arrangements with the majority shareholders had made it a long-term headache for SSR to either introduce serious cost-saving measures or divest from their share of the business.

Peggy's task here was what it usually was: to plough right through the impediments and lay the groundwork for a newer and more efficient way of doing things. All she needed in order to initiate the reforms was the signature of the man who had inherited his family's controlling share in the factory. Fifty one per cent of Aunt Sarah's Cookies and Confectionery Co. belonged to one S.G. Rogers. Peggy's hope was that he would be reasonable, intelligent enough to understand the financial projections of SSR's accountants, and willing to sign on the bottom line without too much fuss. If she kept up a steady pace on the project, she could conceivably resolve all the problems and have another feather in her cap before Christmas.

Peggy got dressed again, tugged a knit hat on over her hair and got her coat, gloves and scarf before heading downstairs in search of a recommendation for where to grab a quick bite to eat. Sam was nowhere to be found, but Peggy came across a man in dusty clothes laying a fire in one of the downstairs sitting rooms. He looked startled to be spoken to and didn't seem to want to meet her eyes, but stood and took off his baseball cap and scratched at the nape of his neck while mumbling that the diner down on the corner of Main and Centre did a pretty good dinner, he guessed.

It had stopped snowing, and in the slanting late afternoon light Peggy was able to get a better sense of the town. Cookie Jar was on one sloping side of a wide, shallow valley. Memories of its nineteenth-century heyday lingered in the big Victorian houses that lined the streets, several of them lit up for Christmas; closer to the downtown proper, solid red brick storefronts and a cluster of steeples put Peggy in mind of old Hollywood movies. But it was clear that the town's heyday was truly in the past. Many of the houses could have done with a new coat of paint, most of the storefronts were shuttered, and the streets were all but deserted.

That made the diner itself a pleasant surprise. Peggy was met with a wall of warmth and sound when she stepped into Angie's Diner: the smells of mashed potatoes and pie and damp wool and coffee as loud in their own way as the conversation and the Christmas carols playing on the radio. All of the booths were taken, but there was still a seat at the long counter for Peggy to slip into. She'd barely had time to tug off her outerwear before a menu was slid in front of her, along with a steaming cup of coffee.

"A new face, huh?" Peggy looked up to meet the gaze of a cheery-looking young woman whose long brown hair was braided with glittering garland. "Welcome to Cookie Jar. You're not going to need that," she said, and pulled the menu back before Peggy had a chance to look at it. She took a pad of paper out of her apron and scribbled on it. "For you… the Chicken Angie, home fries, green beans; pie for dessert, extra ice cream."

"I beg your pardon?" Peggy asked.

"You look like you need it," the young woman said. She ripped a sheet off the order pad and slid it across the pass through into the kitchen. "Order in!" she roared in a surprisingly loud voice, though no one else in the diner seemed startled at all. Turning back to Peggy, she said, "It's my gift, knowing stuff like that. You're a step up from the fried chicken, not quite bad enough to need my nonna's lasagna."

"I was going to order soup and a salad, actually," Peggy said, feeling more than a bit wrong-footed. "If you don't mind, I—"

"Oh wow, you got here just in time. Salad? Pfft," the woman said. She reached over and patted Peggy on the forearm. "Food'll be right up, hon, sit tight and drink your coffee, it'll perk you up."

The woman bustled off to help another customer. Peggy gave serious thought to leaving and finding a drive-through somewhere, but reconsidered when she absent-mindedly took a sip of the coffee. Not only was it genuinely good, but it was hazelnut coffee with a dash of milk, just the way Peggy liked it. She looked down at the cup in amazement, and then startled again when someone sitting at the counter next to her said, "That's just what Angie does. It's better if you roll with it, otherwise she'll over-salt your food for a week."

Peggy looked over to find a blond man smiling at her—a genuine kind of smile, a hint of interest behind it but without being what her mother would have called forward. "Is this an example of that famed small town American hospitality I've heard so much about?"

"Something like that, I guess," the man said. His eyes crinkled at the corners, very pleasingly. "But Angie does the best food in town bar none, it's kind of habit-forming, so like I said…"

"Roll with it?" Peggy finished.

"Exactly," the man said.

"I shall take that under advisement…" Peggy said, trailing off a little so that the man held out his hand to her and said, "Steve."

"Peggy," she said in return. His grip was firm and warm.

"Accent's English, right?" Steve asked. "We don't get many tourists up here this time of year—or any time of year, really—but there's a small state park just up the road if you're interested. It's a little off the beaten track and the snow's closed most of the trails but the road to the falls is still passable and when they're frozen, they're beautiful, and the bare trees in the snow, it's—I mean, I'm babbling but they're—"

"Oh, no, that's—I mean, I am from England originally but—" Peggy was interrupted when a heaping plate of food was set in front of her and a brown paper bag in front of Steve. The meal smelled wonderful, and though Peggy had been no more than mildly hungry, her stomach now gurgled loudly.

"See?" Angie said. "Eat up, but make sure you leave room for the pie, you'll need it."

Steve stood, dug a crumpled bill from the counter of his jeans and left it on the counter. "I should head back; it's getting late. Thanks for the sandwich, Ang. Nice to meet you, Peggy." His gaze caught and held Peggy's for a long moment, clearly appreciative though Peggy didn't think she cut much of a figure in an old pair of jeans and a faded college sweatshirt. She let herself look back and felt a pleasant little frisson of warmth run through her. She was here on a business trip, true, but that didn't mean she had to be all business all of the time.

"Don't work too late!" Angie called after Steve's retreating back. As soon as the diner door swung closed behind him, she turned to Peggy and said in a stage whisper, "He works too much."

"Don't we all?" Peggy said mildly, and picking up her knife and fork, dug into her dinner. It really was very good.

The next morning dawned clear and bright but bitterly cold. Peggy was glad that she'd decided to pack a sweater dress and thick tights—not the most professional attire for a corporate executive, perhaps, but welcome insulation on a day like this. She headed downstairs not long after seven to find that two of the tables in the bed and breakfast's dining room were already occupied: couples travelling for the holidays, it looked like. Peggy nodded at them in greeting, then took a seat at another table near the window.

"Coffee or tea?" Sam asked, appearing at her table with a basket of what smelled like freshly baked bread rolls.

"Now, when you say tea… " Peggy prompted, suspiciously, because she'd been living in the States for almost a year now but that didn't mean she'd at all reconciled herself to what people here did to the humble leaf.

"Don't worry, my husband's got strong opinions about tea too," Sam said, voice dry. "There'll be a teapot. Sit tight and I'll be right back with a box of blends to choose from. Omelette sound good to you this morning?"

It did, and tasted even better, and Peggy used the opportunity provided by Sam topping off the hot water in her teapot to gently grill him for information. The packet she'd been forwarded about the Aunt Sarah's factory gave her chapter and verse on the logistics of the business, but it couldn't tell her anything about personalities. In her job, that was just as—if not more—important.

"This must be a close-knit community," Peggy said.

"We rub along okay," Sam said, his tone perfectly even.

"Yes, I can tell that from the way you took against me as soon as you figured out who my employers are," Peggy said, arching an eyebrow at him. "I don't take it personally—you don't know me from Adam—but it does imply that you are unusually loyal to a company you don't even work for."

"Not for the company," Sam said. "But I've got my people. I've got their backs. You know how it is in a town this size."

"Of course," Peggy said politely, although she'd grown up in the pleasant anonymity of a London borough.

Breakfast eaten, Peggy bundled herself up and headed outside. The air was cold enough to make her nose tingle when she breathed in; from the bed and breakfast's porch, she could see part of the valley that lay beyond the town, a swathe of snow and dark greenery.

Peggy didn't think of herself as a morose sort of person, but she hadn't been anticipating this Christmas with any real enthusiasm. With no time to go back to England for the holidays, she had only her circle of American friends to fall back on, and that wasn't exactly large. She had drinks occasionally with some of the analysts—Rose, Colleen, Violet—but workplace camaraderie hadn't yet been replaced with real friendship. She'd pulled far too many twelve-hour days in SSR's rather grim offices lately. Peggy could of course wrap herself in chunky scarves and order peppermint hot chocolate and string lights around her little apartment when she was home, but as cheery as those things could be, sometimes they were just reminders of how mundane and small her life had become since she'd moved over here.

This change of scenery—the rolling green and white landscape pressing in around the town, the chill in the air and the brilliant blue sky overhead—was a welcome one. If nothing else, Peggy told herself as she descended the porch steps, it was a reminder that she'd accepted the transfer offer because she wanted new experiences, not to do more of the same in a different set of offices. Taking the opportunity to travel more, to see more of the US than the inside of the country's airports, mightn't be such a bad thing.

The Aunt Sarah's factory was on the western edge of town proper, and was oddly cheery for a manufacturing facility. Perched on the edge of the valley and backed by dense evergreen forests, its buildings were of the same red brick as most of Cookie Jar. On top of the largest building, in tall letters of red and green, a sign proclaimed 'Home of Aunt Sarah's Chocolate Wafer.' Rows of wooden candy canes—each at least six feet tall and painted in all the colours of the rainbow—lined the way into the factory site.

Peggy wound down the window of her rental car and showed her ID to the moustachioed man in a bowler hat at the guard hut. He waved her through and to the left, where there were some parking spaces set aside for guests. By the time Peggy parked and retrieved her briefcase from the passenger seat of her car, a neatly dressed man was waiting for her.

"Phil Coulson. Welcome," he said, holding out his hand for her to shake, though nothing about his demeanour or his tone of voice indicated that he was really rolling out the welcome mat for her. "I'm essentially what passes for the financial department around here, Ms Carter. I'm to show you around, give you a sense of how Aunt Sarah's functions."

"That's very kind of you," Peggy said, following Coulson over to what looked like the main door into the factory complex, "though I'm not sure that's necessary. SSR already has quite a thorough understanding of the company's financials, and the practicalities of cookie making are not really my area. I think it would be a better use of our time if we just got straight down to business."

"Mr Rogers thought you might say something like that," Coulson said, mouth twisting, "but he insisted I show you around anyway." He helped her stow her outerwear and bag in his office, and then gave her a white overcoat and hair net to put on. "Not the most fashionable, I know, but we're pretty strict about hygiene regulations here."

Peggy followed him down a hallway that led to the factory floor, one narrow enough that they had to walk single file. Being behind Coulson allowed her to notice that he had a slight but discernible limp. "Have you hurt yourself?" Peggy asked. "You shouldn't be walking me around if you're—"

Coulson shook his head as he held a door open for her. "It's fine. It was a long time ago, I've learned to live with it." He paused, clearly expecting to see some sort of reaction from her and not getting it. The look on his face was half-defensive, half-bemused. "Do you not know about the employees here?"

"Know what, precisely?" Peggy asked, walking on through. The factory proper was a large space, full of the muffled hum of machinery and the smell of sugar and spices. Cookies in a kaleidoscope of colours and flavours whirred past on conveyor belts. "There are seventy-two employees, full and part-time; most working directly in the factory, and then split fairly evenly between administration, marketing, and ancillary services. About ten have been here for more than thirty years, though there's been a significant growth in hiring lately—the benefits bill alone is one of the reasons why the company is in such poor financial shape."

"Afghanistan," Coulson said. When Peggy had no ready reply to such a non sequitur, he continued in a clipped voice, "That's where I picked up the shrapnel in my leg. I was hired here after my discharge. The majority of the company's employees are veterans, or needed someone to take a second chance on them. Mr Rogers has made that company policy, pretty much. There are vets working here with PTSD, amputations; trans kids who've been kicked out by their families; two or three people who've had substance abuse problems and are in recovery. You work here, you get health benefits, you get an understanding boss on your bad days; Mr Rogers even worked out a deal for reduced tuition with the community college up in Weybridge. Some people work here long enough to get their associate's degree, go on to a four-year college or a different career; some people stay."

Peggy blinked. None of the reports she'd read about the business had mentioned that—no wonder people here seemed to be a bit prickly about the prospect of any changes to the company. She couldn't imagine that there were many other employers in this faded, rural part of the state offering this kind of environment.

"We also make some pretty damned good cookies," Coulson said, plucking a sampler box from a passing cart and opening it. They did smell good—none of that sickly sweet, artificial odour that Peggy had quickly learned to associate with most American baked goods—and the cookie that Peggy selected pulled apart easily, moist and dense and decadent.

"Goodness," she said when she'd finished it, brushing some crumbs from her fingers, "these really are delicious."

"Small batches, high quality and equitably sourced ingredients, classic recipes," Coulson said. "It's the reason why Aunt Sarah's Cookies has been around for decades. We're proud of what we do here, Ms Carter. We all want to be very sure you're aware of that."

Peggy was very aware that while work hadn't stopped or even slowed, that she was the focus of many eyes. "I'm not here to cast doubt on the quality of your work, Mr Coulson. I'm not a threat. I'm here to help with ways to save the business. You're losing money hand over fist. You must know that's why SSR has sent me here."

"I see," Coulson said. Peggy had to give him this: he was very skilled at remaining very polite and still while somehow not leaving you in any doubt of his true opinion of you. He checked his wristwatch. "Well, Mr Rogers should be in his office by now. I'll drop you by there. I'm sure you two will have lots to talk about."

They walked through to the far side of the factory floor and into a different set of offices. These were a little more spacious and better maintained, the tile on the floor less scuffed: this was the area that clients and suppliers usually saw, if Peggy had to guess. Coulson rounded a corner, rapped on an office door that stood slightly ajar, and said, "Ms Carter from SSR here to see you, boss." He nodded politely at her and then left.

Peggy went into the office and stopped abruptly. There, looking outsized behind a small desk with a pen in his hand and a mound of papers in front of him almost as tall as his computer, was the man from the diner last night: Steve.

"S.G. Rogers, I presume," Peggy said wryly. Her cheeks felt hot. She reached up and snatched the net from her head, smoothing down her hair.

"And Peggy, short for Margaret." He looked about as surprised as she felt, which was something. There were few things Peggy hated more than feeling a fool. A muscle in his jaw twitched. "Have a seat, Ms Carter."

"Peggy, please," she said as she sat. "I don't think there's much point in us standing on ceremony now."

"No," Steve said slowly, setting his pen down. "I imagine not. Phil's shown you around?"

"Yes, it was very interesting, thank you," Peggy lied, because her mother had raised her to be polite. If she had to be honest, while she found the social purpose underlying the factory to be intriguing, and the baked goods to be delicious, neither bakery nor cooking had ever really been her thing. She wasn't entirely sure that she knew how to turn on the oven in her apartment, and she already knew the people who delivered her takeout food better than she did her neighbours. "I'm afraid I left my briefcase in Mr Coulson's office, but you've seen the majority of the paperwork already. You know the terms that SSR is prepared to offer, which frankly are more than generous particularly if you choose the option of selling your stake to us outright. If you sign today, we can get the reform process under way early in the new year."

"I'm not going to sell," Steve said. "I've been pretty firm on that."

"But the new terms that Mr Phillips has authorised will ensure that you walk away with a sizeable settlement, and with SSR's buy-out—"

"You'll be able to asset-strip the company for a quick buck, and my employees will be without jobs, or health insurance, or the ability to make rent. No, thank you."

Peggy felt stung. "That is not SSR's goal here, our intent is—"

"Intent doesn't matter so much when people's livelihoods are on the line," Steve said. His voice had no trace of warmth to it now. "You hurt them unintentionally, you hurt them regardless. I've submitted an alternative proposal to Phillips. Maybe one day he'll see fit to actually read it and hear me out and we can go somewhere from there. But until then, case is closed. You have a nice day."

He turned to his laptop screen, though Peggy would have bet good money he wasn't actually reading anything.

The drive back to Hillview was short, but Peggy felt as if she'd somehow managed to go through all five stages of grief by the time she parked the car—though perhaps not in the prescribed order. She'd just wanted to come here, make sure that an agreement was put in place with factory management, earn some kudos from her bosses, and head home in time to spend the weekend in her pyjamas working her way through her Netflix backlog. Was that so much to ask? She vacillated between anger and bargaining as she parked the car, stomped up the porch steps, retrieved her laptop from her bag and sat down in the sitting room just off the main foyer to get some work done.

"Self-righteous jackass," she muttered to herself as she fired off an update to Phillips about her meeting with Rogers. It was all she could do to maintain a professional tone in her email—not that she thought there was anything she could say that would cause him to so much as raise an eyebrow, but it was the principle of the thing. "Inflexible, stiff-necked jerk, ugh."

The sound of someone clearing their throat startled Peggy badly enough that her computer almost slid off her lap. She twisted to look around the corner of her wingback chair and found that one of the seats nearer to the open fire was already occupied. It was the same man she'd seen in here yesterday, the one who'd been lighting the fire. Then she'd presumed that he was a handyman of some kind, but now that he was sitting there in cleaner clothes and with his hair neatly pulled back, she wasn't so sure.

"Didn't mean to frighten you," the man said. He had a little card table pulled up in front of him, and it looked as if he was—well, Peggy didn't know what the technical term was, exactly, but she thought "whittling" would suffice. He had a knife in one hand; the other, rather incongruously gloved, held a small piece of gleaming dark wood. Ranged along one side of the table was a collection of tiny carved people. Chess pieces, perhaps. "Just thought you should know there was someone else in here."

"Oh, that's quite all right," Peggy said. "I was frustrated, but that's no excuse for me being inconsiderate." She set her laptop aside and went over to offer the man her hand. "Peggy Carter, I'm staying here for a few days."

He looked up at her, then at her outstretched hand, then back at her face. Peggy was just about to pull back, feeling mortified, when he shook her hand. His grip was cool and dry, but brief. "Bucky. And I know you who you are."

"Ah." Bucky's tone was no warmer than his handshake. "Do you work at the factory?"

He shook his head and went back to his carving. "I'm one of the owners here."

"You're… oh!" Comprehension dawned. "You're Sam's husband?"

Bucky nodded, but didn't seem inclined to take the conversation much further.

"Well," Peggy said. She felt awkward in a way she hadn't since she'd tried to use the loo at a cousin's wedding and walked in on the vicar having it away with her Aunt Marjorie. "It was very nice to meet you. You have a lovely home here."

She was just beating a strategic retreat back to her laptop when Bucky spoke. "I used to work at the factory, back when I first got discharged from Walter Reed."

Oh, Peggy thought, the glove.

"That job kept me going, gave me a purpose," Bucky said. "Without it, I'd never have bought this place or learned how to restore it. I wouldn't have Sam."

"We're still in the negotiations phase," Peggy said gently, summoning up what little tact she'd been born with. "It's obvious that the company is very important to the town, but if you just give me a chance to come to a fair agreement—"

Bucky set down the piece he'd been working on—a knight with his sword—and picked up a new piece of wood. "Steve was the one who took a chance on me. I've known him since he was a snot-nosed brat, picking fights with kids twice his size because he never could stand a bully. By the time we'd turned sixteen, his mom must have been keeping the country's candle industry in business, she lit so many to St Jude." When Peggy looked at him blankly, he said, "That means Steve's mom spent a lot of time praying to the patron saint of hopeless cases. If she was still around, she'd be doing the same thing because Steve never did know when to quit."

"I see," Peggy said. She took a moment to consider. "No one in this town goes in for subtlety much, do they?"

"Not so's you'd notice," Bucky said.

"How fortunate then," Peggy said crisply, "that that's never been a particular failing of mine, either." She went back to her emails, and Bucky to his carving, and though she didn't look his way again she was quite sure that neither of them were doing their best work.

Peggy opted to go out for lunch. Rather than ask Bucky for a recommendation for somewhere else to try and risking another tense conversation, she decided to simply head back to Angie's Diner. The lunch rush in Cookie Jar must either have been an early one, or smaller than Peggy was used to, because when she walked in she found the place almost empty. From the speakers came the strains of Ella Fitzgerald urging people to have themselves a merry little Christmas, and the air was rich with the smell of mulling spices, but only one booth was occupied by two elderly women chatting over coffee.

Angie herself was behind the counter, polishing glasses. She had a phone cradled between her ear and her shoulder, and the long-suffering expression of someone who had been on hold for a very long time. Angie nodded at her to take a seat and said, "Turkey sandwich with brie and cranberry chutney for you, English, but it's going to be a few minutes."

"Is there anything I can do to help?" Peggy asked. "You seem a little, well… stressed."

"You know how to fix an industrial dishwasher?"

"Not a clue," Peggy was forced to admit.

"Then I just need you to sit there and drink that for now," Angie said, pouring her a piping hot cup of coffee. "What? Yes, I'm still here, no, I—what do you mean the parts aren't covered under the warranty? I got it here in front of me, it says it covers 'parts and labour', it—okay, you've got to explain how you think the English language works, if you think 'it covers parts but not all parts' makes one bit of sense."

There was something almost soothing in sitting there and listening to someone else get steamrollered so efficiently. By the time Angie said, "Nine in the morning on the dot, and if there's no repair guy here by then, I will be calling you back and giving you a piece of my mind," Peggy was halfway through her coffee and on the verge of feeling charitable with the world once more.

Angie hung up the phone and bustled off, returning in a few minutes with a plate containing one of the larger sandwiches Peggy had ever seen and a refill for her coffee.

"You must have had a stressful morning, if your dishwasher decided to pack it in," Peggy said as she cut her sandwich into more manageable pieces.

"Ha," Angie said, "that wasn't even the worst of it. Do you know how many people you've freaked out just by being here? That kind of stuff's not good for the digestion, and if your digestion's out of whack, you're not going to enjoy your breakfast, even if it was made by me."

"You know," Peggy said, setting her sandwich back down on her plate, "I am just one person and I haven't even done anything yet, it's a little tiring to be—"

Angie flapped a hand at her dismissively and went back to polishing the glassware. "Oh, I know none of the bad intentions are coming from you. If I sensed anything shady coming from you at all, you'd be getting nothing but cream of mushroom and tuna casserole, morning and night."

"For this small mercy, much thanks," Peggy said dryly.

"But not everyone has my gifts," Angie said, "which was why they're all on edge this morning, so my year-old dishwasher dying a death was the very last thing I needed. You think you've got one thing paid off and boom, you're right back on your ass where you started."

As Peggy worked through her sandwich, the conversation turned from shoddy appliances to just how Angie had ended up as the owner of the diner when barely out of high school to Peggy scribbling down website addresses on a napkin.

"Honestly," she said, "these kinds of grants exist and you should apply for them! Small business, woman-owned, in a part of the state that's been earmarked for new direct investment? These first three are federal, these others are from private foundations, mostly part of the Stark Foundation. You'd be crazy not to apply. At the very least you should be able to get the financing to upgrade your appliances at very reasonable rates."

"Huh," Angie said, picking up the napkin and reading through it before tucking it away carefully in her apron pocket. "Thanks. How do you know about this stuff?"

"It's part of my job, to—"

Peggy was cut off by the sound of the bell over the door jingling. She turned her head to see—who else, of course, because it was just that kind of day—Steve Rogers walk through the door. She repressed a sigh and faced forward as Steve approached the counter. Peggy couldn't remember if she'd ever before met a man whose face was so well-suited to being set in lines of wilful determination.

"Ms Carter," Steve said, sounding as if he were speaking through gritted teeth. Then, more naturally, "Angie. Can I get my usual to go?"

Angie peered at him. "No, but you can have a slice of ham, dry, on white bread, and it's not anyone's fault but your own," she declared, before vanishing into the kitchen.

"If it makes you feel any better," Peggy said, because she'd never quite learned her lesson about discretion being the better part of valour, "I was threatened with the spectre of cream of mushroom and tuna casserole just now."

To judge by the stony silence with which that was greeted, it did not.

"Of course," Peggy continued airily, because really she hadn't learned that lesson at all, "I'm sure a dry ham sandwich is a much better deal."

"Look," Steve burst out, pivoting to face her, "if you think you can win over the town with some sort of a, a charm offensive—"

Peggy couldn't stop herself from laughing. "My god, and people chastise me for being cynical—"

"—that's not going to play here. You can't just waltz into town all…" He waggled a hand; Peggy had no idea what that was supposed to signify. "And just expect that everything's going to fall in line the way you want."

"You are easily the most willfully obtuse man I've ever met," Peggy said, "which given that I once interned in Westminster is saying something, and if you—"

"Ahem."

Peggy startled. She hadn't heard Angie coming back, and judging by the look of surprise on his face, neither had Steve. Nor had either of them realised how close they'd gotten as they'd bickered, bodies leaning into one another so that Peggy could almost count his long lashes. He smelled nice, like soap and fresh cotton, she thought vaguely, and she jerked back in her chair, feeling hot and embarrassed.

"Well," Angie said, handing over a brown paper bag to Steve and accepting a bill from him in return, "I'm not going to say anything right now, but just so the two of you know, I'm going to be thinking it. Very loudly."

Peggy's coping techniques were few but trustworthy—pillows, punching things, the deeply sarcastic streak of cynicism passed down to her by her British forebears—and in the absence of anyone to really vent to or a proper gym, she decided that going back to the bed and breakfast and having a nap was her next best option.

She was accordingly woken from a sound sleep by her phone ringing, and going to voicemail, and then ringing again. Peggy sat up, brushing her hair out of her eyes, saw the name on the phone screen and cursed before answering with as calm a, "Good afternoon, Mr Phillips," as she could muster.

"Good afternoon? I don't see what the hell is good about it," Phillips fired back. Peggy had never been to Texas. That was perhaps in part because she pictured all of that state's inhabitants as being much like Chester Phillips. Being employed by him was like working for a very irascible Eeyore who spoke with a twang and had firm convictions about the price of global oil stocks. "This was supposed to be an easy assignment, in and out, and now my blood pressure's sky rocketing because we're being lambasted on social media by every do-gooder from here to Albuquerque for being cold-hearted, avaricious capitalists out to ruin the lives of hardworking Americans. What in the hell did you do up there, Carter?"

Peggy scrambled out of bed in search of her laptop, and opened it to call up Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google News. SSR was a large multinational, but not one exactly one with much by way of popular name recognition. Almost all of its revenue came from transaction with other businesses, which meant that the company's social media presence was dutiful and staid, the occasional production of a couple of bored interns. Peggy had never known an SSR Facebook post to get more than a handful of comments—now there were dozens upon dozens, all of them lambasting SSR for trying to do away with a small town's livelihood right before Christmas. A search for the company's handle on Twitter was even worse: who knew that so much vitriol could be packed into 140 characters?

"And now I'm getting calls from the local TV news people up there, looking for comments because they're going to be at the union-backed protest this evening."

"Protest?" Peggy choked. Steve Rogers, it seemed, was not to be underestimated. A little part of her admired him for it.

"Lights, camera, action, and round about seventeen tons of bad publicity for SSR. Fix it or you're fired, Carter—and I mean it this time!"

Phillips' bark was generally much worse than his bite, but that didn't mean that Peggy was entirely sanguine as she changed her clothes, fixed her hair, and freshened up her makeup. She'd seen him make split-second decisions to fire people or suppliers. Given that her work visa was only a temporary one, Peggy would have to leave the country, go back to London with her tail between her legs and face a chorus of I told you sos.

"No," she told her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Stubborn hard graft had got her this far and it was going to take her further. As she slicked on a coat of red lipstick, she resolved that this evening she was going to salvage the deal, turn around SSR's reputation, and give herself a shot at the VP position that should open up next year if Gabe Jones, as rumoured, was transferred to run the Paris offices.

By the time Peggy parked her rental car on the shoulder across the road from the factory, the sun was just setting. She wasn't able to get any closer, what with the news trucks and the picketers and the placards and the… was that really… "Good god," Peggy murmured to herself as she peered through the windshield, "where on earth did he get a children's choir at short notice?"

She checked her hair one last time in the rear view mirror, and then got out of the car and headed across the road, mindful of the melting snow beneath her heels. She was expecting to see Steve in the heart of it all, underneath the glare of the TV cameras, but he was in fact looking on from the sidelines, hands in the pockets of his jeans and a faded hoodie stretched tight across his broad shoulders. His profile as he watched one of the workers speak to a news reporter was still and pensive. Peggy told herself that the thrill that ran through her at the sight of him was solely down to the fact that he was dressed so inadequately for a December evening.

"You'll catch your death of cold," she said, standing next to him.

Steve shrugged. "I'll be fine. What are you doing here?"

"Looking to save some jobs, including my own," Peggy said tartly. "And you?"

"I'd say 'likewise', but…"

"But what?"

He still hadn't looked over at her, but the corner of his mouth quirked up. "Those are very pointy shoes you're wearing and I'm pretty sure you know how to use them."

"Ah, now I get it," Peggy said, watching as one of the camera men moved his equipment around so as to get a better shot of the children's choir surrounded by protest signs. Save Our Jobs! said one; Fight Corporate Greed! said another. I Can't Believe I Served in Two Lousy Wars & Still Have to Fight for a Job! proclaimed a third in extremely precise lettering. Peggy was quite certain that if she checked, she'd find it was held by one Phil Coulson.

"Get what?" Steve asked, when Peggy didn't show any sign of continuing.

"You have a tendency to get a little smug when you think you're winning," Peggy said, folding her arms. "Also a tendency to think of everything as a zero-sum game. I'm not here to take away anyone's livelihood."

"Really," Steve said. He was looking at her now and frowning. "You got a bridge in Brooklyn you'd like to sell me while you're here?"

"Oh for pity's sake," Peggy said, and strode forward to introduce herself to one of the journalists.

It wasn't what you could call a public relations triumph, perhaps, but Peggy thought she acquitted herself as well as could be expected. She'd talked with all the local network affiliates about how pleased the SSR was to be able to work with a group of people as committed to their work as the fine folks of Cookie Jar, and how she was sure they would be able to find a path forward for Aunt Sarah's Cookies. No, she said repeatedly, no, there are no plans to close the factory—the company's sole interest was in making it profitable again. Out of the corner of her eye, Peggy could see Steve being interviewed by other reporters at the same time. With his hands on his hips and his brow furrowed, he looked authoritative and thoughtful; in his jeans and hoodie, he looked far more of a piece with the people surrounding him than did Peggy.

So Peggy kept it all upbeat and carefully vague and smiled and smiled, and by the time it was all over and the lights were turned off and the crowd was dispersing, a tension headache was slowly building at the base of her skull. Her mouth was dry, her phone buzzing with Google Alerts, and Peggy rolled out her shoulders as she crossed the road back to her car, thinking longingly of a bottle of water and an Advil. She was just opening the door when she heard a voice calling her.

"Ms Carter!" She turned to find Steve jogging across the road to her and was surprised to see that he looked about as tired as she felt. "I want you to know that this isn't going to be a one-time thing. We've got commitments from people to keep picketing, to start calling our representatives, even to go to the state capitol and protest there. SSR's going to have a fight on its hands."

It was a struggle, but Peggy managed to restrain herself from beating her forehead against the car door. "You know, if you were ever to actually sit down and talk with me, you might be surprised to learn about such wonderful new concepts such as negotiation and compromise. Being a self-righteous jackass might help you feel more at home on the moral high ground, but it doesn't do much to actually change reality or to achieve your goals. Do have a pleasant evening!"

Peggy took a certain grim satisfaction in the look on Steve's face as she drove off, even though she knew her loss of temper had just made any chance of an actual negotiation harder than ever. Perhaps it was time to just write this off as a bad job, she thought; she could email Phillips in the morning and tell him that her professional recommendation was that SSR sell its shares and just walk away. Buyers mightn't be easy to come by, but to Peggy's mind there was no point in throwing good money after bad.

Sleep on it, she told herself when she got back to the bed and breakfast and was pulling on her pyjamas. It wasn't that Peggy was so optimistic as to think that anything would have materially changed by the time the sun came up, but she was practical enough to know that she wouldn't be able to think of a solution while tired and headachy.

Peggy forewent breakfast at Hillview the next morning in favour of a meal in the corner booth of Angie's Diner. A quick check of the local media had shown that while some of the TV stations had taken a sympathetic or at least neutral view of SSR's actions in their news broadcasts, the Cookie Jar Courier was firmly on the side of the factory and its employees. She had the feeling that most people in town were probably of that opinion, so removed herself from any possibility of a direct confrontation with Sam and Bucky over it—it wouldn't do to be evicted from the closest thing the town had to a hotel.

The looks she was getting from the diners' other patrons as she tackled her omelette were bad enough. Angie made sure that her coffee was kept topped up and piping hot, and shot her a sympathetic smile every time she passed by, but that was almost worse. Peggy was starting to feel that she should pin a scarlet letter to her blouse, and ducked her head as she buttered her toast with more than usual fervour.

This meant that she didn't see Steve until he slid into the seat across from her. "So," he said, his tone wavering somewhere between sheepishness and resolve, "it's come to my attention that sometimes I can be a self-righteous jackass."

"What an interesting use of the passive voice," Peggy said, shooting him her most repressive look while she stabbed her fork into her omelette.

"Okay, so maybe you told me that and you're not entirely wrong." Steve shrugged. "Look, I still think that I'm right about the big picture, and about SSR's intentions for the company and what that means for the town. But things have been trending this way for the past three years, and you're the first person SSR's sent to talk to us so I guess that means I should at least try. No reason to shoot the messenger." Steve's eyes were big and earnest and impossibly blue.

Peggy snorted. "Oh, you can stop that right now."

Steve blinked at her. "What?"

"The whole remorseful Golden Retriever act," Peggy said, starting to put together a sandwich from her toast and the remnants of her bacon. "St Steven of the Batting Eyelashes. Does that ever actually work for you? A simple request to talk would suffice, there's no need to over-egg the pudding."

"I wasn't," Steve said, "I mean, I would never—" He was a terrible actor, even if the faint flush on the top of his cheekbones was very attractive.

"Hrm," Peggy said, just as Angie came by and put a mug and bowl in front of Steve.

"Chamomile tea for you this morning, buster, and don't even think about asking for a coffee instead because you're this close to a stomach ulcer. Oatmeal with craisins and fresh pear, your digestion will thank me later."

Peggy was delighted to see the flush on Steve's cheek deepen—he turned red as a beet when he was embarrassed.

"Don't look at me like that, Steven Rogers," Angie said. "I know what's in the fridge in your sad excuse for a bachelor pad. You're just lucky I didn't serve you up some stewed prunes."

Angie went back into the kitchen, and Steve said, with a tinge of desperation to his voice, "I don't live in a bachelor pad, I've never—and my digestion's just fine, I'm not, I don't need any help to—oh god." He put his head in his hands. "This is why I should never talk to women."

Peggy suddenly felt much more cheerful, and took a large bite of her sandwich. "Eat your oatmeal," she said.

Steve huffed and sat back in his seat. "Okay, you want the truth? The union thinks we've got a good case, but they're stretched thin between here and what's going on in Schenectady right now, and then the strikes on Long Island… We don't have the legal backup or the money needed to take SSR to court if worst comes to worst. And this is… the people who work with me, they're my family and I don't ever want to think that they end up getting hurt just because my pride got in the way."

Peggy blinked. "Huh. That's not what I expected to hear."

"Not what I planned to say," Steve said, stirring his oatmeal.

"Well," Peggy said, eyeing him curiously. "The world is full of surprises this morning."

The rest of the meal passed companionably enough, all things considered. Awkward, true, but it would be worse if one of them picked up their breakfast and moved elsewhere. Half the eyes in the diner were on them already. Peggy tried her best to keep the conversation on topics that weren't controversial and Steve, at least, seemed to respect that. He settled on telling her about the wonders of a baseball team—the Yankees—a sport about which Peggy knew almost nothing and cared even less. He recounted a play for her, using sugar packets to represent the bases. Peggy understood not a blessed thing, but it was nice to be able to observe him like this: enthusiastic about something but not on his guard, long-fingered hands emphatic in their gestures. There was something charming, too, in the way that his accent took on a strong local tinge when he wasn't paying close attention.

When she'd drained the last of her second cup of coffee and paid her bill, Peggy stood and shrugged her coat back on. She turned to Steve and suggested that they head to his office and go over the paperwork, thoroughly this time. "I've been mulling things over," she said, "and I've got some ideas for ways to reshuffle things. There are some federal loopholes you could take advantage of—tax incentives, that sort of thing. And even if you do have to let some people go, there are ways they can keep full benefits for an extra six months. It's worth looking into, at least."

Steve looked at her for a long moment, and then held open the diner door for her and said, "Walk with me for a bit first?" Standing there in his dark blue pea coat, blond hair falling across his brow, he was very hard to resist—even when Angie yelled from behind the counter, "Make sure you leave enough room for Jesus between you and Steve, English!"

The door swung shut on someone else whistling, which was clearly very silly. There was no danger of Peggy and Steve getting up to anything untoward at all, though now as they walked she was bizarrely aware of how close their hands were as they walked along: close enough that Steve could have reached out and taken her hand in his big one if he wished. Peggy pushed that thought firmly out of her head. They headed around the corner and up Main Street: the one street, it seemed, where the town could still afford to go all-out with decorating for the holidays.

Though the last snowfall had turned to an unappetising grey slush on the street proper, the rooftops were still a pristine white and the bare trees that lined the street were all strung with hundreds, thousands of lights. Every storefront was decorated with ribbon and garland, every lamppost hung with wreaths made of fresh greenery, and the red brick courthouse was dwarfed by a huge tree decorated in shades of red and blue. Peggy felt a little as if she'd been tipped sideways into a Norman Rockwell Christmas village painting—a little cosy, a little mawkish—though Steve didn't seem to notice at all. Peggy supposed that if you were born and raised in a town called Cookie Jar, this must all seem quite mundane.

"I'm sorry about that," Steve said. "No one really thinks I'd ever have a—like I told you before, it's best just to roll with Angie. She means well, even if…"

"Quite," Peggy said, for want of anything else to say. "Though pretty much everyone in town seems like this."

"A little bit nuts?" Steve replied. He shrugged. "Maybe."

"No," Peggy said, "concerned about you."

That made Steve set his jaw and duck his head. "I'm not anyone important, the factory's the main thing right now."

"Angie doesn't seem to think so," Peggy countered. She'd never been one for much patience with that kind of silly self-flagellation. "Or the Wilsons, or Phil Coulson. Knowing my luck, if, if I crossed the street and asked that woman over there about you, she'd say you once rescued her cat from a tree—"

"That's Mrs Pedersen," Steve said, sounding a bit bewildered. "She taught me in sixth grade."

"—And that I was a terrible person for endangering your livelihood! My god, all of these people—do you know how lucky you are, to have all of these people looking out for you, who care about you? Isn't that the important thing, not working yourself into an early grave for a failing factory? Do you think that's what anyone here would want for you?"

Steve came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the sidewalk and pointed across the street. "You see over there? That barber shop, that's where my uncles went to get their hair cut every month of their lives. Vinny's cut my hair most of my life, too, and his granddaughter works at the factory because she had a kid when she was sixteen and now she's trying to finish her GED and pay for formula. Next door, that's the post office. Mae and Franny work behind the desk and I always make sure to drop them in a deluxe box of Aunt Sarah's Cookies around the holidays because if something's wrong with anyone around here, they're the first to know and the first to make a call to someone they think can help. Ayesha's place two doors down? Phil hired her on working Payroll at the factory while she got her feet back under her after the fire, got her associate's degree at the community college and now she owns her own business. See the roof of that apartment building two blocks down? Half the people living there are vets. Some of them work at the factory now, the rest know there'll be a job ready for them when they're ready. I know I'm lucky, Peggy, and I know I owe people. Seems like SSR just expects me to be fine with walking away because I'd have a fat bank balance, but I'm fine now. And I wouldn't have been fine if I hadn't had this town to come back to when I got out of the army."

Peggy blinked. There was an awful lot about Steve Rogers that hadn't been in the background check she'd been provided, it seemed. "You were in the army?"

"Three tours, Iraq and Afghanistan. And then I came back here and I had a job and a purpose again and most nights I could sleep and even then it's still not about me. You've driven through this town, you know what it's like. It's holding on by a thread, dying by inches. If Aunt Sarah's went away… They changed the name of the whole goddamn town to Cookie Jar in 1964, that's how much it was needed then—and that was when there was still a steel-mill two towns over and you could raise a family on a single income and afford a new car. If it goes away now, before we've had a chance to turn it around, you're not just taking away almost a hundred pay packets, you're making it so people start leaving and you're wiping out most of the town's tax base and that's it, we're done for. The whole town's gone."

Steve looked away down the street for the moment as if uneasy about his outburst, but when he looked back at her there was no hesitation in his gaze. "You get it, right? You're a smart person."

"You're in a sticky spot," Peggy said, trying to find the right words to say but everything she could think of seemed suddenly trite. They started walking again, slower now. She was uncomfortably aware that Steve had been loud enough to attract attention and that there were curious eyes on them. How quickly could the town gossips work, when they put their mind to it? She felt so tense that her back ached with it. "I get that; I empathise. But you're not stupid either, Steve. There's not much SSR can do about broader market forces—nor can you. High costs, relatively low output, increasing competition—all of these are affecting Aunt Sarah's bottom line, and you can't expect SSR to continue underwriting you. That's just now how the world works, and SSR's Board of Directors just aren't prepared to let this go on any more."

"If Phillips would just consider the alternatives I've pitched him…" Steve scrubbed a hand through his hair, sounding suddenly despondent. "You know the company was named for my grandmother, right?"

"No," Peggy said, "but I'm not surprised—it was a family inheritance, after all, wasn't it?"

"Sort of," Steve said. "I actually inherited most of my shares from my grandma's business partner, Abe Erskine. He was the closest thing to a dad I ever had, really. My actual father was killed in the Beirut bombing back in '83, when I was just a toddler. I don't have any memories of him. But Abe, he came to my baseball games and helped me with my homework and was kind to a terrified teenager when I was starting to figure out I was bi. The only thing he ever asked of me in return was that I try to grow up to be a good man." Steve's mouth twisted, as if he'd just bitten into something sour. "I get what you're saying, Peggy. Hell, if you were talking about anyone else, I'd probably agree with you. But this is home. I can't do anything else."

They walked to the end of the block and got drinks from a hole-in-the-wall coffee place. The woman who served them had dark hair pulled back into a severe twist and a straight-backed bearing that screamed military, even to Peggy's uneducated eye. "Rogers," she said as she handed over their coffees, "ma'am," and honestly Peggy was surprised that the drinks were at all warm, given a reception that frosty.

"Another former factory employee?" she said when the shop door swung closed behind them.

Steve winced. "No, no, that's… just Maria."

Steve offered to drive them both out to the factory in his truck, an American monstrosity of a thing that Peggy almost needed a ladder to get into, especially while clutching a coffee. It was almost disorienting, how high above the ground they were perched; she certainly couldn't imagine trying to negotiate a Hampshire lane in this thing.

"Are you gripping the edge of the seat?" Steve asked, glancing over while they were waiting at a stoplight.

"No! Perhaps," Peggy said with ill grace. "Hush. Not all of us grew up with cars the size of tanks, you know."

"Just because England is pocket-sized—"

Peggy sputtered. "England is a perfectly fine country, you shameless colonial—"

"Are you going to start singing Rule Britannia?" Steve asked. "Because if you start singing Rule Britannia, you'll have to get out and walk. Those are the rules."

"Should I swap out my clothing as well?" Peggy plucked at the hem of her skirt. "Don some American flag-patterned cut-offs and a t-shirt with bald eagle on it?"

"No, that dress looks pretty on you," Steve said, distracted as the light finally changed and they could turn onto the main road out of town. When he realised what he'd said, the tips of his ears turned red. "I mean, the dress is pretty. Not that you're not pretty, you're very be—it's just that the dress is—that colour—you don't have to change anything for—" He took a deep breath, cleared his throat. "Geez."

"My god," Peggy marvelled as they turned into the staff parking lot at the factory, "you really are terrible at this."

"So Buck tells me every chance he gets," Steve said glumly as he parked.

"You're just lucky you're cute," Peggy said, and stifled a laugh when Steve, flustered, tried to get out of the truck without taking off his seatbelt first.

Peggy had reviewed all of the documentation to do with Aunt Sarah's Cookies at least a dozen times: contract negotiations, income statements, audits, quarterly reports, and more. And yet, as they dug into the mound of paperwork that Steve had stacked on his desk—"Good lord," Peggy said, "haven't you ever heard of a scanner? Or better yet, actually typing things on an actual computer"—Peggy started to come across things she hadn't seen before.

"I don't know why," Steve said. "We sent over everything we were required to. Plus all this stuff here, this is part of the proposed rescue package we sent to you guys three months ago. Phillips said he'd consider it, but we never heard anything more about it. Phil and I figured it was just him blowing us off." He tapped one long finger against the cover of a thick, spiral bound report—something Peggy was quite certain she'd never laid eyes on.

She picked it up and started to leaf through it, slowly at first and then with a sense of increasing confusion. There were no guarantees that the plan Steve had laid out here would work, but it would certainly put the factory on a better financial footing, modernise its equipment, increase SSR's chances of turning a profit in the future and give Aunt Sarah's Cookies and Confectionery a real fighting chance. The report was clearly the result of hours of work, overseeing the restructuring had been explicitly assigned to Peggy, and yet the report had never crossed her desk. "Why on earth would he keep this from me?" she murmured to herself as she scanned a row of figures.

"What?" Steve asked.

"You said you'd submitted reports to Phillips, to SSR," Peggy said. "Reports, plural." She hadn't thought about them much before now, assuming that she'd skimmed them and just not noticed the author.

"Well, yeah," Steve said. "That was why I was so pis—why I didn't understand why they sent you here like we'd never tried to change anything when we had. I mean, we had all the…" He sat back heavily in his chair. "You never got the reports, did you?"

"No," Peggy said vaguely, looking through more of the reports, cross-checking figures. It felt like there was some pattern there that she couldn't quite see, though whether because she was too close to things or too far away, she couldn't tell yet. "Which doesn't make sense, because if there was never any intention to do anything, why send me here at all?" She rubbed at her temples, feeling the onset of a second headache in as many days; perfect.

"Trying to lull us into a false sense of security?" Steve suggested. "I mean, I looked you up, you know your stuff, you've got a fancy résumé. Sending you here makes it seem like SSR actually wants to do something."

"Why, Mr Rogers," Peggy said, "was that a compliment?" She spread the three main reports out on the desk in front of them. "If any one of the three of these had gone missing, I would be inclined to chalk it up to an oversight, or a problem with interoffice mail. It happens. But three? That suggests a case of the left hand not wanting the right hand to know what it's doing."

"Corruption," Steve said flatly.

Peggy drummed her fingertips against the desk, mentally flipping through the most likely scenarios. "Plausible deniability. Send someone out here with a reputation for good work while… Given the size of this town, I'm sure you know who's responsible for keeping track of property deeds, sales of land, that sort of thing?"

Steve frowned. "Don't know her well, but that'd be Lucy-Ann Maracle over in Howton; that's the county seat, next town over."

"Good, because I would be very curious to know," Peggy said, "just who owns the land around us right now."

Before they could make any calls, they were interrupted by one of the administrative assistants, a young woman called Wanda with very impressive skills in eyeliner application. "Angie said you two would need soup and sandwiches around five," she said, dropping a large brown paper sack of food and some bottled water on the desk in front of them, setting her bangles to jingling. "Also, to hydrate."

The smell of food was enough to set Peggy's stomach to gurgling, and for them both to decide that Angie's prediction had been accurate.

Rather than try to eat in Steve's tiny office, they took the food out into the break room. There wasn't actually that much more space in here, but one wall had been replaced by a pane of glass that looked out onto the factory floor, making it seem bigger. Despite the hour, it was still busy as the evening shift worked to fill the extra Christmas-time demand. Peggy could see Phil Coulson down there, talking to a dark-skinned man with an eye patch; a sandy-haired man with a boxer's nose pushed a palette of empty boxes over towards one of the machines.

Steve reheated the carton of soup in the microwave and poured it out into two bowls for them—butternut squash, creamy and smoky and peppery—and set it on the table together with the packet of sandwiches. "Grilled cheese is a little cold," he said apologetically as he sat down.

"Doesn't matter," Peggy said, swallowing her first mouthful of soup. "This is wonderful. How does she always seem to know what someone is craving?"

Steve laughed, dipping one end of his sandwich in his soup. "You ask Angie, she'll say magic. Me, I think she's just really good at reading people. Probably the only person I know who's a better judge of character than Sam is."

Peggy drank some more of her soup, and maybe there was something in there that made her put aside practicality and say, "So what do you think it means, that Angie still thought both of us would be here together so late?"

"Well, um," Steve said, and she could so clearly see him casting around for something suave to say that she had to duck her head to hide her grin. Peggy didn't make much of a habit of one-night stands, but nor was she philosophically opposed to them. Steve was thoughtful, and handsome, and she kept getting distracted by his hands. It was too bad that it could only be for a night, but she would be leaving soon and there was virtue in taking pleasure where you could. "I mean, I was wondering—that is, when we're finished up—"

The door to the break room opened suddenly, and Wanda poked her head in. "Boss," she said, sounding breathless, as if she'd run up the stairs, "you need to come right now."

Peggy looked down at the factory floor, sure that she'd see that there'd been an accident, but no one below seemed perturbed. Something else, then, and she stood to follow Steve but was stopped in her tracks when she saw the look Wanda was directing at her. Peggy had barely interacted with the girl, and couldn't fathom what she'd done to earn a look of such disdain—it seemed a bit beyond even what she'd garnered from other townspeople before. Still, she followed the two of them back downstairs to where Wanda's desk stood.

Wanda twisted her computer screen around and said, "This just aired on CNBC." She jabbed at a button on her keyboard and the video started up again: it was Chester Phillips, being interviewed by a journalist on the front steps of SSR's branch office in Los Angeles. The journalist had questions about SSR's stock price, its sale of an Indian utility company, and rumours that it was competing with Hammer Industries to buy out an up-and-coming tech start-up in San Francisco. Phillips responded with the kind of blunt incivility that would make any PR person worth their salt wince and reach for the vodka. He must truly have been waylaid out of the blue—Peggy couldn't see Lorraine ever knowingly letting Phillips interact with the media unsupervised.

"Some of our viewers will also be aware that SSR has had some image issues lately," the journalist continued. "There's been a significant social media response to your company's apparent attempt to divest from an interest in a small factory in upstate New York: hashtags, protests. SSR seems on track to replace Bain as the new bogeyman for those agitating against venture capital firms. What is your company's response?"

"I'll tell you the same thing I just told Thompson and Sousa," Phillips said and oh lord, Peggy thought with growing horror, they'd had a late lunch and a liquid one, hadn't they? "I generally consider it a badge of honour if what my company's doing makes some pantywaist millennials get a rumbly tumbly. Sentimentality doesn't make for good business. Thinking otherwise is why this country is in the state it is! That's why I sent my best operative up there to make sure things work out the way they're supposed to. Damn if she's not good at knowing how to cut the knees out from people just as soon as feelings get to be involved. The bottom line is what's important."

Peggy felt her jaw drop. In her pocket, she could feel her phone start to vibrate, buzzing angrily and repeatedly; she didn't have to see the screen to know that it was filled with alerts. She looked up from the computer to see that Wanda was looking at her with disgust, arms folded, and that Steve had blanched. "That's—it not what it sounds like. Steve—"

"After feelings are involved, huh? Because the bottom line is what's important. Wanda will escort you off the premises, Ms Carter," Steve said, and pushed past her, and Peggy had never heard him sound like that before: so utterly flat, so cold.

Wanda fetched her coat for her—holding it out gingerly between finger and thumb, as if it had been doused in something nasty—and saw her to the door. Peggy asked her if she could call a cab, since she'd driven there with Steve; Wanda just blinked slowly at her and said she was sure that SSR's best operative had a fancy smartphone that could make calls even better than her landline. Peggy knew she'd had more humiliating moments in her life. It was just that, as she stood there by the factory gates, waiting for her cab in her inappropriate shoes and in the dark, trying not to be blinded by the car headlights of factory workers arriving for the evening shift, it was very hard to think of any.

The cab driver who picked her up was blessedly taciturn, and Peggy didn't have to speak other than to tell him she wanted to be let off near Angie's Diner. It started to snow on the way into town, gusts of wind whipping the snow around, and just walking the block from where the cab dropped her to where she'd parked the rental car was enough to have her shivering. There was a ticket on the windshield too, just to add insult to injury, and Peggy sat in the car for a long while and shook—angry and hurt and humiliated beyond belief—until it had warmed up and she felt she could drive without being a danger to anyone.

Still, by the time she made it back to the bed and breakfast, Peggy was crying. She pinched the skin between thumb and forefinger to make herself stop, blew her nose, and hoped that she would make it inside and up to her room without anyone noticing her reddened eyes. She always hated the thought of anyone seeing her crying. No such luck today, though—Sam was behind the reception desk, checking in another guest.

Peggy must have looked as bad as she felt, because while the guest signed a credit card slip, he pointed Peggy towards the drawing room and raised an eyebrow significantly. And perhaps Peggy was worse off than she was even aware, because she went meekly. She sat in front of the blazing fire, and clasped her hands on her lap, and wasn't particularly aware of anything until a tray was set down on the low table in front of her.

"The glass is brandy, the mug is tea," Sam said, sitting down on the low loveseat opposite her. "This is not an either/or option, you're going to start with the brandy and work from there, okay?"

Peggy nodded, because she knew if she'd try to speak, she'd start to cry again. She downed the brandy in two swallows and then picked up the tea; not drinking it yet, but letting the mug's warmth sink into her hands while the brandy did its best to warm her from the inside out. Sam didn't make her speak, which she was grateful for. They just sat there until Bucky padded into the room on silent feet and showed Sam something on his phone's screen. Both Sam's eyebrows shot up, and he looked a question at Bucky. Bucky shook his head.

"You know," Sam said conversationally, turning to Peggy, "maybe I'm speaking out of turn here, maybe you just need an Oscar more than Meryl does, but this doesn't seem like the kind of reaction I'd expect from a double-dealing international expert in corporate espionage."

Peggy's laugh was wet. "Perhaps not, no." She took a sip of her tea, which was far more heavily sugared than she normally liked, but just then the sweet shock of it was welcome. She swiped at her cheeks again. "Or at least, not from a good double agent."

"We haven't been in the business of punching people for a while, but there's a chance we could get talked back into it," Sam said. Bucky sat down next to him, and though the sofa should have been too small for two grown, broad-shouldered men they seemed to know instinctively how to accommodate one another, in the way long-married couples often did. "This thing with your boss…"

"It's not every day that your employer makes you out to seem like… like some kind of amoral femme fatale on national television." She pursed her lips. Knows how to cut the knees out from people just as soon as feelings get to be involved, and Peggy knew what Steve had to be thinking: that she had led him on deliberately.

"I don't think that anyone's—"

"Don't you? I've never been one for rose-tinted glasses. My position at SSR is untenable now, all because one man couldn't hold his liquor. Anyone who's ever thought I was too ambitious or that my lipstick is too bright, or who attributed my ideas to Sousa or Thompson, well, they're going to find their opinions are confirmed. Nothing I did was ever me." Something twisted in her gut. Peggy had resigned from jobs before, but always because there had been a new opportunity beckoning on the horizon, never because her hand had been forced. Never because she'd been someone else's pawn. It was a new and entirely unwelcome feeling.

"You could sue 'em," Bucky offered.

Peggy shook her head. "Not my style." Lawsuits could be unpredictable, and Peggy preferred to be certain that people would get their comeuppance. There was something going on in this town, something underhanded, and she would far rather get to the bottom of it herself—and then use whatever evidence she found against SSR. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, as her mother always said, though in Peggy's case she was furious less about the rejection and more about being made to look a fool.

"You're not going to shank anyone, are you?" Sam said warily.

"If it's possible to do so in a way which humiliates them in front of millions of people," Peggy said crisply, "then perhaps."

For the first time since she'd met him, Peggy saw Bucky grin. "Wow, Steve read you one hundred per cent wrong."

"I shall take that a compliment," Peggy said. Judging by the look on Bucky's face, it was intended as one—and yet it seemed cold comfort indeed.

She took another cup of tea up to her bedroom with her, and drank it while drafting her letter of resignation from SSR. It was difficult, because part of Peggy knew that it was important not to burn any immediate bridges, but the temptation to write the whole thing in words of four letters was strong. She showered, and dried her hair, and burrowed under the covers, and gave up on any prospect of sleep around two in the morning. Instead, she dug her laptop and phone out of her bag and got to work. Huddled under the comforter, she composed more emails, left some voice messages and requested call backs, rescheduled her flights back to DC, loaded up Google Maps in about six different browser tabs and worked through some databases which—in the very technical, legal sense—she was not supposed to be able to access.

By a little after four, Peggy had some strong suspicions and an even stronger need for caffeine. She pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and put her hair up in a haphazard ponytail—no need for business clothing right now, though she put on some red lipstick out of force of habit—and headed downstairs, thinking she could abscond with some coffee from the kitchen if she left an apologetic note. Instead, she found that Bucky was already up, flour smeared across one cheek as he worked a bowlful of dough.

He looked up at her when she pushed open the kitchen door, and cocked an eyebrow. "You going to need an alibi? I can give you one, if you need it."

"That is very kind of you," Peggy said sincerely, "but probably not necessary."

She helped herself to some of the coffee that Bucky had already brewed, and told him she'd be extending her stay at Hillview another few days. "Though I'll give you my personal card, to charge the rest to. I haven't resigned yet, but…"

Bucky grinned, and punched down the dough in his bowl. "Expecting to get fired fairly soon?"

"Something like that," Peggy said, and headed out into the dark morning.

Peggy drove over to Howton, parked two blocks down from the county clerk's office, and pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt before walking the rest of the way. Perhaps not as good as an outright alibi, but enough to give her some plausible deniability, she thought—at least until she rounded the corner and saw Steve's big truck sitting right there in the parking lot.

"That bloody idiot," she said with a sigh, though she didn't know why she was surprised, exactly. Had Steve ever exhibited a penchant for subtlety?

Peggy jogged over and rapped gently on the driver's side window. Steve startled and looked up from his phone; when he caught sight of her, he very visibly swallowed before opening the door.

"Hi," Steve said, "it's not what it looks like."

"Really?" Peggy tilted her head to one side. "Because it looks like you were planning on breaking into the county clerk's office."

"Okay," Steve said, stepping out of the truck. Like her, he had thought to wear a hoodie, though why he thought it would do much to disguise his height and the breadth of his shoulders was anyone's guess. "So maybe it's exactly what it looks like. Peggy—"

"A full apology can wait until later," Peggy said. "Presuming you acknowledge now, of course, that you were an ass—but make it quick, it will be light soon and we don't want anyone to see us hanging around here."

Steve gaped at her a little and then said, "I'm sorry."

"See, not so hard," Peggy said briskly. Then she dug a couple of hairpins out of jeans pocket and said, "Come on, let's see how long this is going to take me."

Not long at all, as it turned out—a standard pin tumbler lock was no great problem to Peggy, who had had a few months of rather middle class rebellion when she was sixteen.

"To be fair," Steve said, as the door came open, "you knowing how to do this kind of stuff doesn't make it so far-fetched that you could be some kind of corporate spy."

Peggy huffed. "Please just tell me you thought to bring a torch—flashlight, whatever you Americans call it."

Steve had, though it seemed that the batteries were nearing the end of their life and gave only a weak and flickering light as they navigated their way towards the file room. Most of the county's title deeds sat there in blessedly analogue format—no funding to digitise them, Peggy's sure, and likely not much impetus. It took a few minutes for them to figure out which file cabinet to focus on, and adrenaline trickled through Peggy's system as she worked as quickly as she could, snapping pictures on her phone of the files that Steve held out to her.

"I'm just pulling anything that looks fairly recent and in the right area," Steve said, rifling through the folders with long fingers. "We can go through them more closely later."

"Sadly," Peggy agreed, getting her camera to focus on what looked like a series of related transactions, "they're rarely so considerate as to leave a smoking gun in plain sight."

By Peggy's watch, they were in and out in barely fifteen minutes, with not even a hint of a complication, though she felt as alert and as lit up as if she'd just sprinted a mile. Perhaps she'd missed a calling. Steve didn't look quite so thrilled by it all, though Peggy was delighted regardless when he tugged down the hood of his sweatshirt.

"Good lord," she said, "you are capable of bedhead. I thought you'd just been born looking like that."

"Like what?" Steve asked with a frown. "Peggy!"

"I'll see you back at the bed and breakfast," she called over her shoulder, and hurried back to where she'd left her car.

The sun was just rising by the time they got back to Cookie Jar, though the dawn's light was refracted through renewed snowfall. Sam was standing in the doorway when Steve and Peggy pulled up, a mug of coffee steaming in his hands. Steve must have called him to say they were on their way.

"I made you guys some breakfast," he said when they climbed the porch steps. "But you are not to take this as encouragement for breaking the law. I mean it this time, Steven Rogers," which made Steve look caught between embarrassment and defiance and Peggy wonder if she was the only one who'd had a partially misspent youth.

Rather than have them eat with the other early-rising guests in the dining room, Sam ushered them through to the back of the house and into the kitchen. As far as Peggy could tell, it was the only space in the building to have been wholly renovated rather than restored. There was no hint of the Victorian era in the gleaming cabinets or the professional-looking appliances. She and Steve sat on stools ranged along one side of the large central island. Bucky had commandeered half of the island as part of what looked like an intense baking operation, but breakfast was laid out on the other half.

"Oh man, are those sugar plum cookies?" Steve asked, reaching out towards one of the racks where cookies sat cooling, even though he already had a large spinach and bacon omelette sitting on his plate.

"No," Bucky said, smacking Steve on the back of the hand with a wooden spoon. "They're for the school bake sale. I will end you. Eat your breakfast."

Peggy shook her head, tuning out the sound of Steve and Bucky's gentle bickering as she ate a fresh bread roll dripping with butter with one hand, and used the other to start tapping away at her phone's screen. She was quite certain that the names she'd seen on the title deeds all belonged to shell companies, but there were ways of tracking who was behind them.

She had progressed to chewing on a bit of bacon, while Steve used a tablet provided by Sam to start mapping out recent property sales in the county. Not all of them were suspect—a local vet had retired and moved to Boca, selling his two-bedroom house on to a teacher from Cookie Jar's lone elementary school—but those that were clustered suspiciously all around the factory.

"They don't give a damn about us, they just want the land," Steve said, at the same time that Peggy exclaimed, "Thompson owns it, that rat bastard."

"See, babe?" Bucky said to Sam. "Now I think she's going to shank someone."

There was no blood involved in the end, or at least not literally. The paper trail checked out, and one of Peggy's contacts in DC returned her call shortly after nine that morning: Jack Thompson, SSR Northeastern Regional Director, had indeed been receiving some nice backhanders from Hammer Industries.

"The weapons manufacturers?" Steve said with a frown. "What do they want with land in western New York?"

"What's beneath it," Peggy said, finishing up her cup of tea. It was her third, or perhaps fifth, that morning; she'd lost track, but at least the caffeine was helping her to ignore the fact that she'd had no sleep. "You should wear blue for the press conference, by the way. Not that you need any more help looking All-American, but it will bring out your eyes a treat."

"For the what?" Steve blinked.

"Oh, darling," Peggy said, patting him on the forearm and hopping down off her stool, "Of course there has to be a press conference. We're going to destroy them in a very public manner, and it's going to be beautiful."

Peggy went and got changed, and made some more calls, and by the time she came back downstairs a press conference had been arranged for five. "Just enough time to get things turned around for the evening news broadcasts, while still giving reporters from the city a chance to make it up here."

"Just how big a conference is this going to be?" Steve asked from where he was standing at the foot of the stairs with Sam. He clearly had found time to pop home himself, and was now wearing a neatly pressed pair of khakis and—Peggy smiled to see—a deep blue knit sweater. His hair was combed into careful order, and Peggy found that her fingers itched with the need to see him with bedhead once more.

Fighting that urge, she braced her hands on her hips. "Well, a number of news outlets were quite interested once I told them that Tony Stark was going to be there."

"Huh," Sam said.

"This should be fun," Steve said, deadpan.

Tony behaved himself during the press conference, at least for the most part—which was exactly Peggy's intention. He and Pepper Potts stood next to Steve, and smiled broadly while they announced that Stark Industries was just thrilled to come on board with Aunt Sarah's Cookies and Confectionery Co. as an angel investor.

"This is another milestone in SI's ongoing partnerships with community-oriented and environmentally aware businesses," Pepper said, hands clasped demurely in front of her. "We're so excited by the prospect of furthering our commitment to sustainability."

"Also transparency, super excited by transparency, yay," Tony said, "speaking of, have you guys seen the cache of documents we've just uploaded to SI's servers? Let's just say, Hammer Industries, much more excited by bribery and corruption and trying to illicitly strip mine rare earth metals from beneath the very feet of the good, plain people of upstate New York. Is it news that Justin Hammer does something illegal while being incompetent about it? No. But is it going to be fun seeing him try to spin this one? Oh, boy, you betcha."

Peggy sat at the back of the room, laptop out to let her monitor the media reaction in real time, and basked. Just watching Steve try to cope with the fact that he was on camera would have been entertainment enough—he was very quietly, but very clearly, panicking about what to do with his arms and was alternately folding them and putting his hands on his hips—and yet that was merely the gravy. Round about the time that CNN's news ticker read HI, SSR STOCKS TANK IN WAKE OF CORRUPTION ALLEGATIONS … JUSTIN HAMMER DENIES ALL INVOLVEMENT, she hit 'send' on her letter of resignation and then sat back to watch the rest of the press conference unfold.

When it was all over, they went to Angie's Diner for dinner. Peggy had expected that Pepper and Tony would head straight back to Manhattan, but they tagged along as well.

"Tony says it should be an anthropological experience in the world of the greasy spoon," Pepper said with a sigh, navigating the snowy sidewalk carefully in her towering stilettos. "I apologise in advance."

"After what you guys did for the town today, I don't think anyone will care," Peggy said. Through the diner window, she could see that a celebration was already in full swing: Angie was wearing a pair of foam reindeer antlers, Tony was standing on the counter eating from what looked like a giant bowl of mashed potatoes, Sam and Wanda were dancing around the tables, Phil Coulson even seemed to be passing around a bottle of champagne, all of them surrounded by at least two dozen people whom Peggy didn't even know. "Thank you again. This was such a big request, coming from someone you only knew from MBA classes—"

Pepper held up a hand. "It was all in a good cause. Also a little revenge for the time Justin Hammer tried to grope my ass backstage at a TED talk. By the way," she continued, pausing at the diner door, "Tony's going to offer you a VP position based out of our New York offices. I'd take it, if I were you. Just make sure you negotiate for an office at least five floors from his."

The door swung shut behind her, and Peggy was left to gape a little: left speechless for the first time that day and not sure if she'd heard correctly, or if the sleep deprivation was finally catching up on her.

"Everything okay?"

Peggy turned to see Steve walking up the street from where he'd parked his truck. In the light spilling through the diner windows, his hair glowed; even in the chilly night air, he looked warm and solid and content. "Do you ever have the feeling," she said slowly, "where nothing's turned out as you planned it and yet you've ended up with so much more than you ever thought to ask for?"

"I met you, didn't I?" Steve said shyly, and then closed his eyes and groaned. "Sorry, just… forget I said that, that sounds like a terrible line, I wasn't trying to—I mean, if you want to—but not that I'm—"

"You really are terrible at this, aren't you?" Peggy said, walking over until she was right in front of him: close enough to smell soap and clean cotton, and the faintest hint of stubble along the line of his jaw.

"Hopeless," Steve agreed, eyes still squeezed shut.

"Steve?" Peggy said.

He opened his eyes, and her breath caught. They were so very close, and all she would need to do is stretch up on tiptoe, just a little. "Yeah, Peg?"

"Not to be too self-congratulatory, but I am actually pretty good at this sort of thing myself," Peggy said, "so I would very much appreciate if you could kiss me before my arse freezes off and—" And Steve's mouth was hot and his hands were gentle and Peggy was most certainly not shivering because she was cold.

By the time they made it inside the diner, all of the celebratory batch of cookies that Phil and Wanda had brought with them from the factory was long gone.

"Sucks for you," Tony said, crumbs caught in his goatee. "These things are actually pretty damn delicious."

"It's okay," Peggy said, "I'll have plenty of chances to try some in the future," and Steve took her hand and held on tight.