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We stand there in the cold, in the hum, two feet apart, breath fogging into the same air, and I realize I'm not getting the answer tonight — and that the not-answering, from a man who documents everything, is itself written down somewhere. Filed. Load-bearing.

"Get home safe," he says finally, rough, wrecked, backing toward his truck without breaking eye contact, like the last honest thing he can do tonight is put distance between us in the most watched way possible. "Text me when you're inside."

I drive home with the radio off.

I text him when I'm inside.

He texts back one word — Good — and I lie awake staring at it like it's four hundred pages long, because tomorrow he briefs a task force at eight, and my launch is in thirteen days, and there are only so many two-inch gaps of air left in this county before something catches.

Chapter 9

Brady

Good, I texted her, and then I lay in a rented cabin composing answers to her question until 3 a.m., which is how I arrive at the case briefing looking like one of the exhibits.

The briefing is what briefings are. A conference room at the county annex, burnt coffee, Ferro running the board: six scenes pinned in a timeline, the lab reports, my origin analysis, a geographic profile that draws a circle around Woodbridge Falls and everything in it. The case group is Ferro, two of her people, a state fire investigator named Okafor's-cousin-or-something who Junie would already have dirt on, and me, contracted through EPG as of 8:06 a.m.

I present the pattern. Bigger, closer, more public. When I put the launch poster up next to the timeline — two hundred attendees, open flame theming, county-wide publicity, twelve days — nobody in the room argues. Ferro assigns extra patrols, agrees to the gate plan, and closes with the sentence every investigator loves: "We've got no suspect, no witness, and a town full of dry barns. Find me a thread, people."

I drive back toward the ridge with a case file on the passenger seat and one thread of my own that I can't put on any board:

Why did you avoid me for ten years?

She asked the question. The question is now an open file. And the thing about open files — I told her this myself, like a fool — is that they don't close on their own. Needs make patterns. Patterns are just questions asked enough times.

She's in the barn when I get there, of course, because there are two hundred limited-edition jars in various states of becoming. Late afternoon by the time we finish the propane manifold walkthrough; gold light through the west windows by the time she signs the security plan acknowledgment; blue dusk by the time we run out of legitimate reasons for me to be here, and I'm still here.

She's at the workbench, wiping down pour pitchers. I'm supposed to be packing the kit. Wick has gone up to the hayloft, which in retrospect I should have read as the animal kingdom evacuating ahead of the event.

"Tyler quit the parking crew," she says, conversational, to the pitcher. "Danielle's cousin's boyfriend — apparently being background-checked once was plenty for him. So I'm down a body for the lot, if you know anybody who can wave a flashlight and glare at tourists."

"I'll be at the gate."

"You'll be at the gate," she agrees. "Watching two hundred people for one guy who loves fire too much. And every single time I look up from a pour, I'll know exactly where you are, because that's apparently a thing I do now—" the rag stops moving — "I always know where you are in a room, Brady. It's like a smoke alarm, but for you. It's very annoying. I wanted you to know that before I lose my nerve."

The kit bag is in my hands. I put it down.

"Sloane."

"You don't have to answer last night's question." She turns around, backlit by the workbench lamp, chin up — brave, and I can see what it costs, which is the thing that finishes me. "But I'm not going to pretend I didn't ask it."

And there it is. Ten years of architecture, and the load-bearing wall was never distance. It was her not knowing. That's the wall that held everything up, and it's already rubble, and the only thing left standing in me is the truth, so I say it.

"It was never dislike." My voice comes out like it's been through a structure fire. "You want the origin report? Fourth of July, your parents' backyard, ten years ago. You argued with me about airflow and marshmallow load ratios and you were right, and you laughed at something I said, and I stood there across a fire I'd built wrong and understood I was in the kind of trouble that doesn't burn out. You were twenty-two. You were his little sister. He asked me to look out for you, and I looked at you instead, once, and it scared the hell out of me. So I did the only thing that worked." I make myself hold her eyes. "Distance. Every tent pole, every early exit, every holiday I suddenly had field work — that was me, taking care of the one thing I could be trusted with. You spent ten years thinking I didn't like you because I needed you to think that. Because it was that or this."

The barn is silent. The melter ticks as it cools. Sloane Mercer looks at me with her eyes shining and her jaw set, doing math — I can see her doing it, ten years of recalculated Thanksgivings — and then she pushes off the workbench and crosses the floor and stops six inches away, inside every radius I've ever maintained.

"And do you still think," she says, "that it's that or this?"

I should say yes. There's a version of me — this morning's version, the version with a best friend and a system — who says yes.

I say nothing. I'm done saying things.

She kisses me first.

Soft. A question, asked against my mouth, her hand coming up flat against my chest — and I hold still for exactly two seconds, the last two seconds of the longest fire watch of my life, and then I break.

My hands find her face, her jaw, the loose hair I've been rationing myself to two fingers of, and I kiss her the way you do a thing you've inventoried for a decade. She makes a sound into the kiss — surprised, then not surprised at all, then yes — and her fists close in my shirt and she pulls me with her, back the way she came, until her hip hits the workbench, and the pour pitchers rattle, and neither of us so much as flinches, which tells you where the safety protocols have gone.