Page 24

"Move," she demands, before I've finished being careful. "Brady. I have waited — you can be thorough LATER⁠—"

So I stop being careful. The pitchers rattle. The lamplight swings. She meets me stroke for stroke with her heels digging into me and her arms locked around my neck and her mouth at my ear, narrating in a breathless filthy whisper — harder, there, God, you feel — she talks during, of course she talks during, thank God she talks during — and when her voice starts fraying and she tightens around me again I get a hand between us, find her clit slick and swollen, and work her over the edge a second time, and she comes loud enough to vindicate the cat's evacuation, pulsing around me, and I follow her, deep, unstoppable, ten years arriving all at once, her name the only word left in the building.

After, we stay wrecked against the workbench, her forehead on my collarbone, my hand moving in her hair, both of us breathing like survivors. The melter ticks. Somewhere above, Wick descends the hayloft ladder with the weary air of a shift supervisor.

"So," she says, muffled, into my chest. "That happened. On the bench I do my taxes on."

"I'll note it in the appendix."

She laughs — the seal bark, unguarded, my favorite sound in the county — and then goes quiet, and I feel the moment reality reaches the barn, both of us watching it come.

"This is a terrible idea," I say, into her hair. Her brother's face at dinner. The open case. The assessment with my signature pending. Every wall I ever built, in a pile around a workbench.

"I know," she says.

Neither of us moves apart.

Above us the café lights burn on their dedicated circuit, up to code, safe as houses, and I stand there holding my best friend's sister in a barn I'm supposed to be assessing, and for once in fifteen years I don't run the scenario. I don't map the exits. Tomorrow has a briefing and a firesetter and a phone call I owe a man in Kingston someday soon, and every one of those is going to burn exactly as hot as it's going to burn.

Tonight, the origin point is right here, breathing against my chest, and I'm done pretending I'd ever want to trace it anywhere else.

Chapter 10

Sloane

Neither of us moved apart for a long time, is the thing, and that's my current working theory for why, at ten the next morning, I pour an entire batch of First Frost at the wrong temperature and turn forty jars of premium soy blend into forty jars of expensive frosting failure.

"It's fine," I tell the ruined batch. "You're compost now. We celebrate all career paths in this barn."

I also print thirty shipping labels before noticing I've mislabeled an entire wholesale order — the bookshop in Phoenicia is expecting Library Embers and is currently scheduled to receive thirty units of Mountain Man Musk, which, given my life right now, is less a clerical error than a confession.

I fix the labels. I do not fix the underlying condition, which is that every time I look at my workbench I experience a full sensory flashback and have to go stand in the walk-in cooler with the finished inventory like a Victorian widow.

Ten years he stood at the far end of tents. Fourth of July, marshmallow load ratios. He called me the kind of trouble that doesn't burn out and then he took me apart on my own workbench with the thoroughness of a man doing the job he loves, and this morning I can't stack jars in a straight line.

By noon I've given up on precision work entirely and switched to tasks a distracted woman can't ruin: sweeping, box-breaking, aggressive tidying. The barn has never been cleaner. Danielle keeps finding reasons to pass through my blast radius, radiating teenage diagnosis.

Junie comes by at one with sandwiches, takes a single look at me across the candle bar, and sets down her tote bag with the gravity of a paramedic arriving on scene.

"Oh my God," she says. "It happened."

"What happened? Nothing happened. I'm behind on the numbered edition, that's a stress face⁠—"

"Sloane Marie Mercer. You have wax in your hair, you're wearing the cardigan you save for when you can't be trusted with feelings, and Bev says his truck was here till eleven." She pulls up a stool, eyes enormous. "It. Happened."

I hold out for four seconds. "Ten years, Junie."

"I KNEW IT⁠—"

"He avoided me for ten years because of me. Because of the Fourth of July when I was twenty-two, he's got the whole thing filed — the origin report, he called it, who says that, why did it WORK on me—" and it all comes out, the confession, the workbench, the taxes joke, while Junie clutches her sandwich to her chest like a rosary and makes noises usually reserved for figure skating.

"Wait wait wait." Junie holds up a hand, closes her eyes like she's doing long division. "The origin report. He gave you — he told you the exact moment. With a date. Men don't have the date, Sloane. I've asked men for the date as an experiment. The best I ever got was 'probably around when you got the haircut,' and the haircut in question was someone else's."

"He had the date. He had the marshmallow ratio." I press my hands to my face. "Junie, he's had the whole thing this whole time. Every family party I spent thinking I was invisible to him, I was — I was load-bearing. Do you know what that does to a decade of your own memories? I keep re-shelving them. The wedding. The Thanksgivings. That Fourth of July I've told you about a hundred times as the story of the hot rude guy who peaked early⁠—"

"You're going to have to retell me literally everything. I want the director's cut with the new information."

"There's more." I drop my hands. "He's coming back tonight. Probably. His truck does a thing now where it just — arrives."