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"Hearth implies containment." I check the melter clearance I've checked twice. "Ember implies risk. People buy risk."

She stares at me for a second, and then points the Ember label at me like an indictment. "That," she says, "is the most cynical, most correct piece of marketing analysis anyone has ever given me for free, and I hate that it came from the fire police." She writes EMBER on the batch sheet. "You're getting a commission candle. It's going to be called Compliance and it's going to smell like paperwork and repression."

"Top notes of laminate."

"A hint of no." She's grinning down at the sheet, and I'm grinning — internally, where it's structural — and this is the job now: I drove up here to fail a barn, and instead I'm naming candles at nine in the morning with wax on my sleeve and a cat on my equipment, and the report I owe Alden gets one day shorter every day I don't write it.

Her phone buzzes on the workbench. She's got both hands in a crate of jars, so she says, "That's Wes — can you hit speaker?"

And this is how I end up standing in a barn between my best friend's voice and my best friend's sister, holding a paint pen she handed me for no reason, like a bomb tech who wandered into the wrong movie.

"Sloanie. How's my favorite fire hazard?" Wes's voice fills the barn, big and bright and trusting.

"Compliant," she says. "Almost. Your guy's here — you're on speaker."

"Brady! How's it going up there, man? She being difficult? You can tell me. I built up an immunity over thirty years."

Sloane rolls her eyes and mouths something at the phone that would get her citated in a different code entirely.

There are several true answers. She's difficult the way weather is difficult. Your sister is the most relentlessly alive person I've ever assessed. I've extended this assignment past any professional justification and this morning she handed me coffee like we're something, and I said thank you like we're something, and I don't know how I'm going to walk it back.

"She's being thorough," I say.

There's a beat of silence on the line, because Wes was loaded up for banter and I gave him a compliance report. But across the workbench, Sloane goes still over the crate. She looks up at me. And she mouths — silent, so her brother can't hear it — thank you.

That's all. Two words, no sound. It lands in the center of my chest like a strike-anywhere match.

"Thorough, wow, okay," Wes is saying. "Who are you and what have you done with my sister. Hey, before I forget — Rangers home opener, I got the tickets, you're coming, no case is allowed to eat you this year⁠—"

He talks. I answer in the right places. He asks if I've seen the barn cat that Sloane "claims is a professional mouser and is objectively a decorative throw pillow with opinions." I look at the decorative throw pillow currently warming my laser thermometer and say the cat seems effective. Wick accepts the perjury with a slow blink. Wes moves on to the field office, to their mother's Thanksgiving spreadsheet, to a plan involving all three of us and a corn maze that I make a noncommittal noise about, and every topic is a hallway in a house I've been renovating a wall away from for a decade. Sloane labels her jars, and the barn smells like vanilla and applewood, and my oldest friend's voice bounces off the beams of his sister's dream while I stand here between them, being trusted by both, lying to both, feeling the match burn down.

"—anyway, take care of her, man," Wes finishes, breezy, terrible, precise as a sniper. "The barn, I mean. Later!"

He's gone. Sloane caps her paint pen with great attention.

"So," she says. "Thorough."

"Statement of fact."

"Mm." She smiles down at her jars, and mercifully, mercifully, lets it go. "The fire tables come Thursday. And the electrician finishes tomorrow, which means you'll be out of excuses to loom around my barn drinking my coffee."

"I don't loom."

"You're doing it right now. Wick, is he doing it right now?"

Wick, from my kit bag, confirms. Traitor. I've been feeding him jerky when she's not looking, which was supposed to buy loyalty.

"Verification requires site presence," I say, which is my new favorite sentence, because every word of it is true and the whole of it is a lie.

I leave at noon and don't drive south.

Pruett Road runs along the ridge northeast of town, and the trailhead lot is empty except for a county pickup and a strand of caution tape sagging between two pines. Fire number five is a half-acre scar walking uphill from the parking area — black on the ground, char licking up the trunks to about knee height before the crews knocked it down.

Deputy Marshal Ferro meets me at the tape because I called ahead and because favors between fire people are the only currency that never inflates. She's fifties, built like a hydrant, and she watches me work the scene edge with her thumbs in her belt.

"State's calling it discarded smoking materials," she says. "Trail traffic, dry season. Case closed by Friday."

"You believe that?"