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"You were having a feeling. I saw it. Ten a.m. on a Sunday, no permits pulled, nothing." She points her pen at me, wildly pleased. "This barn is a licensed feelings-free workplace, sir. I'm going to need you to file the appropriate⁠—"

"Sloane."

"There it is AGAIN⁠—"

That's the state of the dam at 10:15 a.m.

At 10:40 she puts me to work on the numbered edition, because "you have the steadiest hands in this barn and the labels are limited-edition, Callahan, if one goes on crooked it's crooked in two hundred living rooms forever." So I press labels while she pours, the two of us at the workbench in a production rhythm that feels older than three weeks, and she tells me about year one — the craft fairs, the church basements, the winter she heated this barn with a kerosene salamander I'm grateful I never saw — and I tell her which of her jar suppliers has the better tempering record, because that's what I have instead of stories about feelings, and she takes it exactly the way it's meant.

"Hey," she says at one point, apropos of a label, not looking up. "Whatever happens with your firebug. The launch, the case, all of it. I'm glad it was you they sent."

The label goes on straight. Fifteen years of documented hand stability.

"Even though I cited the bunting," I say.

"The bunting radicalized me. It's different now."

At 11:40, we settle the morning's last clearance dispute — her pour-demo canopy, my sight lines, a compromise involving moving one table nobody will miss — and it happens the way structure failures always happen. Not with a bang. With load, applied steadily, to a member already stressed past rating.

She's showing me the limited-edition label. Number 001 of 200, Orchard Bonfire, her handwriting on the proof, and she's excited — talking with both hands, conducting — and a strand of hair comes loose from the pencil and swings into her eyes, and she blows at it, twice, hands full of label proofs, and misses both times.

I move it.

That's all. Two fingers, one strand of hair, half a second, tucked behind her ear — and then my hand is just there, at the side of her jaw, not leaving, and she's stopped talking. The proofs are still in her hands. The barn is dead quiet except for the melter ticking and Wick's tail going somewhere in the rafters of my peripheral vision, and Sloane Mercer looks up at me with her eyes wide and the label for number 001 crumpling slightly in her grip, and neither of us is pretending anything anymore.

"Brady," she says. Quiet. A question with my whole name in it.

Ten years. Ten years of tent poles and far ends of tables, ten years of driving south with the radio off, ten years of being the one man in every room who never looked at her, which every man in every room knew was its own kind of looking. Her chin lifts half an inch. The proofs whisper against her apron. I can smell vanilla and applewood and underneath it something warmer that no assessor's language will survive, and I lean⁠—

Three ascending tones. Loud. Twice.

Channel 1031 detonates in my jacket pocket like the world's most passive-aggressive smoke alarm, and we jolt apart — she takes one full step back into the candle bar, I take one step back into a drying rack, forty jars rattle, Wick achieves vertical liftoff from a standing start.

I have run into burning buildings with more composure than I currently possess.

"You—" she clears her throat, crimson, straightening label proofs with enormous diligence. "You should get that. Could be an emergency."

"It's always an emergency. That's the channel."

"Then it's definitely an emergency. Go. I have — labels."

I step out into the cold with my pulse going like a hose under pressure, and take the call, and it is, in fact, the emergency I've been waiting eight days for.

"Callahan." Ferro, no preamble, wind noise behind her. "Lab came back early. Your Pruett Road samples — medium petroleum distillate, consistent with camp fuel. And here's your Christmas present: they pulled the retained debris from the Route 9 shed and the bandstand steps. Same product family. Three scenes, one signature."

The ridge is right there over her barn roof, black scar and all, and the whole valley below it is dressed in dry timber and fairy lights and telephone poles wearing Sloane's launch poster.

"It's official, then," I say.

"It's official. Multi-scene serial arson investigation, as of nine forty this morning. County's standing up a case group — small, quiet, no press yet. Marshal wants you in it, contract through EPG. First briefing's tomorrow, eight a.m." A beat. "You said this pattern graduates, Callahan. You still believe that?"

Through the barn window — single-glazed, non-tempered, item four, appendix A — I can see Sloane at the candle bar, holding label proof 001 of 200, looking at nothing, touching her ear where my fingers were.

Thirteen days out. A confirmed serial firesetter, a case group standing up in the morning, and eleven minutes ago I was one strand of hair from kissing the woman whose event I've promised the county I'll armor. Ferro's still talking — logistics, briefing room, parking — and I answer in the right places, watching Sloane through the glass set proof 001 down flat, square it to the bench edge with two fingers, and press her hands to her face like a woman doing arithmetic she can't show anyone.

"Yeah," I say. "I believe it's already picked the venue."

Chapter 8