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He's out there twenty minutes.

I know because I watch every one of them from the window with my arms wrapped around myself, tracking his flashlight along the fence like a lighthouse in reverse, and somewhere around minute eight the full inventory of the last three weeks rearranges itself in my chest. The fires were a town story, then a case, then a countdown — but they were still out there, at trailheads and bandstands, other people's corners of the county. Now there's a beam of light moving along MY fence line at seven p.m. because a man who reads burned buildings for a living went pointer-stiff in my barn, and the distance between out there and right here has collapsed to the width of my north field.

"It's fine," I tell Wick, who has not moved from the sill, whose tail has not stopped. "He's checking. Checking is what he does. He checks toilet paper holders."

Minute fourteen. The light stops moving, low, near the equipment shed, and stays stopped for a long time.

"It's probably a raccoon situation," I tell Wick. "A structured raccoon situation."

Wick's tail goes flat and still, which is somehow worse than the lashing.

When he comes back, he's carrying his phone in one hand, photos open, and his face is the flat one. The bigger the burn, the flatter the voice.

"Somebody's been walking your fence line," he says. "Recent — since the rain Tuesday. Boot prints along the outside of the north fence, and a spot behind the equipment shed where the grass is flattened. Someone stood there a while." He turns the phone. In the photo, caught in the flashlight beam against churned mud, a print. Toe dug in deeper than the heel. "Facing the barn."

The barn light is warm and yellow and every window feels enormous.

I built those windows for light. South-facing, big panes, golden hour pouring across the retail floor every afternoon like free advertising. Three years I've loved them. It took one boot print to teach me they work in both directions.

"Could be a hunter," I hear myself say. "Deer season's⁠—"

"Could be." He doesn't believe it, and he's not insulting me by pretending. "Same tread pattern as a partial we pulled at the trailhead. I'm sending both to Ferro tonight, and she'll get a car up here on rotation, and tomorrow I'm putting game cameras on your fence line. If it's a hunter, we'll have a very boring video of a hunter."

"And if it's him." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "He's been standing behind my shed, watching my barn. Doing his — his homework. On me."

And whatever's showing on my face pulls him across the room before I finish the sentence, and then I'm folded into all that flannel and load-bearing architecture with his hand cradling the back of my head, his chin on my hair, his heartbeat steady as a metronome under my ear, and God, the unfairness of how safe it feels, this exact chest, this exact man, the one we can't tell anyone about.

"Hey. Listen to me." His voice through his ribs, low thunder. "He does homework because he's a coward. They're always cowards — they light things and run, because a fire is the only time anything answers to them. He is not getting an answer out of this property. I've got the county, the case group, six cameras coming, and a professional grudge fifteen years deep." He tips my chin up. In the lamplight his eyes have stopped pretending to be granite. "And I've got a very personal reason to be thorough."

"Extremely unprofessional," I whisper.

"Report's filed. I signed."

I laugh into his chest, wobbly, and his arms tighten, and outside my window the field goes fully dark — my beautiful field, flagged for fire tables, cased by a coward in the tree line — and inside there's this. The terrible idea. The him of it.

"Stay," I say. Muffled. Brave. "Not — I mean the couch is there, I know you'll say the couch, the cameras aren't up yet and you'll invent a perimeter reason anyway, so skip to the part where you stay."

Because here's what I know about this man, three weeks in, that I didn't know in a decade of tents: he will perimeter-check the whole county before he lets himself want anything. He'll guard the launch, the barn, the town, my brother's feelings, my certificate, the chain of custody on his own heart — everything on the property before himself. Somebody has to put HIM inside the fence line for once.

Might as well be me. I'm told I'm stubborn.

I feel the breath go out of him. His hand stops in my hair.

"Sloane. If I stay tonight—" he says, and doesn't finish, but I hear all of it. The line we're already over. Wes. The launch. Tomorrow, 0900, per spec.

I lean back and look up at him, my hands full of his shirt, and give him the only compliance I've got left.

He looks at me for a long moment — the full assessment, top to bottom, every load path checked — and I watch the last clean line he ever drew get quietly, deliberately filed under obsolete.

"Stay anyway."

Chapter 11

Brady

Stay anyway.

Two words, and every exit plan I've ever drafted files itself under obsolete.