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"He investigates arson. He worked a serial case for eleven months. He's got copy access to the county fire marshal up here. That's not clipboard work, that's — how have I known this man a decade and I'm learning his actual job from the man himself, on a tailgate?"

"Huh," Wes says, with the profound self-reflection of a golden retriever. "I guess it never came up. Brady doesn't really — he doesn't talk about himself. You know how he is."

"I'm learning how he is."

"He's the best guy I know," my brother says, easy, automatic, like it's a fact about gravity. "Grumpy as hell, but if I ever needed anything, he's the first call. Anyway — is he being fair? About the barn?"

I look out the kitchen window. In the dark, you can just see the pale shape of the field where two hundred people are going to stand in three weeks, if a six-four thundercloud with a tablet decides to allow it. He drew my light poles in the right places, is the thing. From memory. From one conversation.

"Yeah," I say. "He's being fair."

"Told you. Listen, I'm driving, I gotta go — tell him the Rangers game, he'll know — love you, bye."

The phone goes quiet, and the kitchen goes quiet, and Wick judges me from the refrigerator.

Tomorrow he comes back at nine to check the pallet situation and spec my fire tables. And the thing I keep arriving at, standing in my dark kitchen with a dish towel over my shoulder like a woman in a commercial for bad decisions, is that I'm looking forward to it.

Not the launch. Not the sign-off.

The him of it.

"Don't say it," I tell Wick.

Wick says nothing, at volume.

Chapter 5

Brady

The him of it, if she could see it from the inside, is a man lying to his own calendar.

Here's the honest audit. The assessment scope Alden handed me was five working days. Verification of remediation items — the electrician, the cabinet, the pallet removal — could be handled with photos, emailed, thirty minutes at a desk two hours south of here. I have written that exact recommendation for other clients. There's a template.

Instead, I'm on day six, standing in Sloane Mercer's barn at eight fifty-five in the morning, holding one end of a commercial wax melter while she walks backward in front of me yelling "pivot," ostensibly because relocating it four feet closer to the dedicated circuit is a two-person job and her part-time helper doesn't come in till noon.

"You could've waited for Danielle," I say.

"You were here." She guides her end down onto the reinforced pad — the pad she poured to my spec, cured and level, because when this woman decides to comply she complies like it's a competitive sport. "Besides, you lift like a man who reads lifting safety guidelines, and Danielle lifts like a nineteen-year-old. Wick, clear the zone, we've discussed this."

Wick does not clear the zone. Wick has decided, over the past week, that I'm furniture, which is the highest honor he confers. He relocates to my kit bag and sits on the laser thermometer.

I should be documenting the melter pad. What I'm doing is watching Sloane label sample jars with a paint pen, tongue between her teeth, hair pencil-stabbed into a knot that's one bad decision from structural failure, and cataloging the morning's evidence against myself:

Item one. I know her coffee order now, and she knows mine, and there were two cups on the candle bar when I walked in, and neither of us mentioned it, because mentioning it would make it a thing, and it is a thing.

Item two. Yesterday I stayed until six because she asked my opinion on parking flow, which is not fire, and I have opinions on parking flow now.

Item three. This morning I told Alden the site "required continued on-site verification through the event date," and Alden said, "Uh-huh," in a voice I've chosen not to think about.

Item four. There is a paint pen in my breast pocket. She put it there an hour ago — "hold this" — and I have conducted the entire melter relocation without giving it back, because returning it would require acknowledging it's there, and acknowledging it's there would require explaining to myself why I like it.

This is what fifteen years of investigative discipline looks like when it meets a woman with a label maker. For the record.

"Question." She holds up two labels, one in each hand, like a court exhibit. "Autumn Hearth or Autumn Ember. For the wholesale line. And before you say 'they're the same,' they are profoundly not the same, and I'll know if you guess."

"Ember."

"Why?"