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He does. I watch him do it. Appendix D, line nine, in the driest language ever committed to a county document: Gate personnel attire to be consistent with event theming per client requirement. My launch's aesthetic is now legally binding, and if I ever doubted this man was courting me in the only language he speaks fluently, there it is, notarized.

"Also," he says, not looking up from the tablet, "the appendix needs a name for gate staffing. Unless you'd rather the county assign somebody."

"Depends. Is the county's guy six-four with a documented flannel collection?"

"The county's guy is Kowalski."

"Then write yourself in, Callahan," I say, and go back to my flags so I don't have to watch him try not to look pleased about it, which I can feel from thirty feet away anyway, like heat off a pour.

He stays through the afternoon and past it. We eat lunch on the flatbed trailer — sandwiches from the general store, because I've learned he won't stop working unless food is physically placed in his radius — and he tells me, between bites, in installments I have to coax out like a splinter, about the town he grew up in. Smaller than this one. Pennsylvania. A volunteer department where his uncle ran the engine, which is where a quiet fourteen-year-old first learned that fire has rules, and that knowing them is a kind of power nobody can take off you.

"So you were always like this," I say. "There was a tiny serious Brady, checking the smoke detectors."

"I did check the smoke detectors."

"I know you did. I've never been more sure of anything." I hand him the other half of my sandwich, which he takes without negotiating, which is new as of Tuesday and which I have elected not to examine. "Tiny Brady. Little clipboard. God, your poor mother."

"She laminated my first citation," he says, deadpan, and I laugh so hard I nearly fall off the trailer, and he watches me do it with the pilot-light eyes, and neither of us says anything about anything.

Danielle clocks in at noon, takes one lap of the field with the flag map, and finds me at the candle bar. "So the fire guy moved the third table eight inches off your sketch," she reports, nineteen and neutral as Switzerland. "Should I move it back?"

"Why'd he move it?"

"Something about sight lines from the gate." She chews her gum. "Also he re-leveled the display model. Twice. It was already level. I watched him check."

"Leave it," I say, and she says, "Uh-huh," in her mother's exact voice — she's Marlene's kid, the uh-huh is hereditary — and adds the incident to the town record.

He leaves after dark only when I physically walk him to his truck, and — this is the part I keep replaying while I brush my teeth, while I don't sleep — he waits in the driveway, headlights on my porch, until I'm inside with the door locked. I watch through the window as the truck sits there a beat longer, then backs down the gravel.

Ten years, this man made himself scarce every time I walked into a room. I had him filed under rude. Under doesn't like me. A decade of leaving early, arriving late, finding the far end of every tent.

And now there's a cruiser on Main because something in this town likes fire, and Brady Callahan is measuring my field like it's the only assignment on earth, memorizing my coffee order, standing under my ladder like a man waiting to catch a piano.

"Wick," I say. He's on the bed. It's not allowed and neither of us cares. "Sidebar. If a man avoids you for ten years, and it turns out the whole time he was — what if avoiding someone that carefully is its own kind of paying attention?"

Wick makes biscuits on the quilt, which is not an answer.

Because here's the thing I keep snagging on, at eleven, at midnight, at 12:40: you don't avoid something for ten years unless you have a reason. You don't build a whole architecture of distance around a person who's nothing to you.

Nobody flees a fire that isn't burning.

Chapter 7

Brady

Nobody flees a fire that isn't burning, and I would know, because it's 4:51 a.m. and I'm lacing up running shoes in a rented cabin like a man who believes cardio is a fire break.

I didn't sleep. This is day three of not sleeping, and I've stopped pretending it's the mattress.

The cabin came furnished in Early American Hunting Lodge — plaid everything, a wall clock shaped like a trout, a wood stove I inspected before first use because of course I did. It's fine. It's quiet. It's two point one miles from her property line, a number I have never once calculated, out loud, to anyone.

The inventory of what's keeping me up, in ascending order of severity: a firesetter who's graduated to landmarks. Lab results due any day. An event I've promised to armor-plate in two weeks. And at the top of the list, worse than all of it, the way Sloane's fingers felt under mine on a coffee cup, and the fact that when I said not anyone on Thursday, standing too close to her in that field, she looked up at me and didn't step back, and I stood there holding a wheel measure like it could save me.

Ten years, I had a system. The system had one rule. Distance. It worked because I never tested it, the way a dam works until you drill a hole in it to see what happens.

I run the ridge road in the dark. Four miles out, the town below all porch lights and one slow cruiser on Main, and my brain does what it does on ridge roads now — it runs her launch like a scenario. Gate here, egress there, wind out of the northwest, and every iteration ends the same way: with the variables covered and one uninsurable factor standing at the candle bar laughing at something Danielle said.

Four miles back, lungs burning, legs burning, and none of it touching the actual fire, because the actual fire is not a cardiovascular problem.