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"Three things." My hand keeps moving in her hair; that part's involuntary now. "One. The final assessment. I finish it honest, Sloane. Every line. You pass because the site passes — anything else and it's worthless to you, to the county, to your brother⁠—"

"Agreed. Obviously. Two?"

"Two. The site plan gets an addendum tomorrow. Cameras, gate list, Ferro's rotation. Until this guy's caught, nights here get — structured."

"Structured like a rotation car, or structured like—" she walks her fingers up my sternum, and I catch them and flatten them over my heart.

"Structured like both. Three." And this one sits on my chest a moment, heavy, before I say it, because saying it makes it a scheduled deliverable, and I've never once missed one. "Wes. We tell him. Not — sideways, not caught, not Bev. Told. By us, on purpose, standing up." Her breath goes still against my ribs. "After your launch. I'm not detonating anything eleven days out from the biggest night of your life — you've earned every minute of that night clean. But after. Whatever it costs."

She's quiet a long time, her hand flat over my heart, the house settling around us, the field dark and cased and guarded out the window.

"Whatever it costs," she repeats finally, small, like she's weighing twenty years of my best friendship against a barn full of wanting, and then she presses a kiss over my heart like a signature, and there's worry in it, and I feel it exactly where she left it.

Eleven days.

She falls asleep mid-sentence, something about wristband colors, her breath going long and even against my ribs, and I lie there in the lamplight doing the one inventory I've never let myself complete: her hand on my chest, her cat annexing my boots at the foot of the bed, her grandmother's quilt, her ceiling, her house, her ridge out the window with its black scar. Every item present and accounted for.

I fall asleep in her bed anyway, with vanilla in my lungs and my phone face-down across the room — and for the first time in fifteen years of fire work, no part of me is listening for sirens.

Chapter 12

Sloane

No part of him was listening for sirens, he tells me two days later, like it's a lab result. Like I haven't already noticed that he sleeps with one hand fisted in my shirt now, this enormous vigilant man gone quiet in my grandmother's quilts, and that in the mornings he looks about six years younger and mildly confused about it.

We develop a rhythm, over the next week, and the rhythm is this:

Daylight, we're professionals. He arrives at 0900 with the county's blessing and his tablet, and we work — because launch is coming like a freight train and there is SO much work. Two hundred numbered jars to finish. Game cameras to mount, gate lists to draft, fire tables to dress with lava rock that photographs well ("aesthetic load rating," he deadpans, holding a piece up to the light, and I marry him a little). Danielle drills the extinguisher stations. Ferro's rotation car crunches by twice a night, and the deputies now leave with free candles, because I'm building a coalition.

Daylight-adjacent, we are extremely not professionals. There's a system: his truck visible in the driveway during business hours only, like a sundial of plausibility. There's what Junie calls the Schrödinger's Flannel protocol — a spare shirt of his lives at my house now, and as long as nobody opens the closet, he both does and doesn't. There's kissing in the walk-in cooler like teenagers while Danielle rings up tourists forty feet away, his cold hands under my sweater, my laugh muffled in all that load-bearing shoulder.

And there is Bev, who materializes at the barn Tuesday "for my sister's musk order," takes one look at the two of us standing a compliant four feet apart, and says, "Uh-huh," with the flat certainty of a woman reading a billboard.

There is also the launch itself, bearing down on all of it like weather. Nine days out, the ticket count crosses two hundred and Danielle institutes a color-coded crisis board. Somewhere in the middle of it, the wristbands arrive in the wrong shade of orange and I have a small, contained breakdown about it in the walk-in cooler, and Brady finds me there and doesn't say the wristbands don't matter — he says, "Walk me through the difference," and listens to a four-minute lecture on autumn palettes with his arms around me and the inventory chilling my back, and then says, "Call the vendor, invoke the reprint clause, section four of your order confirmation," because OF COURSE he read my wristband contract, and I have never wanted anyone more in my entire life, which is possibly a diagnosable condition at this point.

Six days out, Ferro's people quietly interview every vendor on my list. Five days out, the gate cameras get an upgrade I'm not supposed to notice, and a second rotation car joins the night loop, and I notice, and I make cider for both crews, and nobody talks about why.

The town knows. About us, I mean. The town is being weirdly, tenderly decent about it, is the thing — nobody's called Wes, nobody's posted anything, Bev just pats my arm harder than usual now. Small towns keep two kinds of secrets: the ones they shred you with, and the ones they carry for you like a casserole. Apparently we're a casserole.

But it's sneaking, still. Under the coalition and the flannel protocol, that's the true name for it, and I hate it a little more every day — every time Wes texts the group chat about Rangers tickets, every time Brady's jaw does the guilty-dog thing Junie predicted. Ten days, I tell the guilt. Ten days, then we stand up and tell him on purpose.

The guilt, like Wick, is unmoved by my declarations.

Junie's only comment on the whole arrangement, delivered over Tuesday wine: "You know what's funny? The entire town is currently protecting two EPG-adjacent adults from one extremely nice man in Kingston, while an actual arsonist walks around loose. Bev has a tactical phone tree, Sloane. She's using it on your love life." She swirls her glass. "Priorities-wise, I say nothing. I only observe."

"Observe quieter."

"Can't. Espresso machine ruined my volume knob years ago."

Thursday, I catch him cheating.

We're doing the final interior walkthrough — the real one, the one that goes to the county and the insurance carrier with his license number on it — and he's at my fragrance organ with the tablet, and he pauses at the display shelf above it. The shelf is new. Danielle and I mounted it Sunday. And I watch Brady Callahan look at my anchor points, look at his tablet, look back at the anchors — and start typing a pass.

"Measure it," I say.

He stops typing. "The load's within⁠—"

"Brady. Two weeks ago you laser-leveled my TOILET PAPER HOLDER. Danielle and I hung that shelf with a YouTube video and vibes. Measure it."