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He measures it. It's out of spec — thirty-one inches over a heat source where code wants thirty-six, exactly the kind of thing October-Brady would have written up before his coat was off. He looks at the tape measure like it's betrayed him personally.

"Move the organ eight inches left and it clears," he says finally, quiet.

"Great. We'll move it. That's not the part I'm mad about." And I take the tablet out of his hands and set it on the bar so he has to look at me. "You were going to pass it. You, the standpipe-was-dry guy. The man the mayor of Poughkeepsie fears." My voice wobbles and I hate it, so I plant my hands on my hips over the top of it. "Listen to me, because I will only say this once with this much sincerity and then never again: I don't want to pass because you're sleeping with me. I want to pass because I earned it. If your signature on my file means anything — to the county, to Wes, to me — it's because it can't be bought, not even by—" I gesture at myself, apron, wax, all of it, "—all this. So be the filing cabinet, Callahan. It's what I—" and I swallow the word that almost gets out, ten days early, and land on: "It's what I fell for."

He looks at me for a long, long moment. The barn ticks. Wick, on the register, watches like it's a nature documentary.

"Eight inches left," he says, rough. "And I'm re-measuring everything you and Danielle hung with vibes."

"Thank you."

"Sloane." He catches my wrist as I turn, and his thumb finds my pulse, and his eyes are doing the thing that makes the granite look like a rumor. "For the record. That's what I fell for, too."

The respect is somehow hotter than everything else, is what I would tell Junie, if I told Junie everything, which I do, so I will.

"Also for the record," he adds, releasing my wrist and picking the tablet back up, assessor voice reassembling itself piece by piece, "you were never getting a free pass. I rewrote appendix B twice because I didn't trust my own margins. Alden's reviewing the final before it files — I asked him to, day one of—" a pause, a decision, "—of us. Belt and suspenders. Your certificate will be bulletproof, because you're right: it has to be worth more than what I want. Everything I sign has to be. That's the whole job."

"Day one," I repeat. "You built oversight into our relationship on day one."

"I built oversight into ME on day one."

"That is the single most Brady sentence ever constructed." I hand him the tape measure like a rose. "Re-measure my vibes, you beautiful bureaucrat."

He re-measures everything Danielle and I ever hung, mounted, or improvised. Two more items fail. I fix both the same afternoon, on a ladder, while he stands underneath doing the piano thing, and Bev, who materializes mid-fix to collect her sister's order, takes one look at the arrangement and says she'll come back when the museum exhibit is over.

Friday afternoon, two things happen forty minutes apart, because life is a person who watched me build a house of cards and started stretching.

Thing one: the assessment closes.

He does it properly — walks the whole site one last time with Ferro's checklist merged into his own, me trailing him with coffee like it's day one, except now I know what the flat voice hides and he knows I know. At the candle bar, at 3:40 p.m., he signs it. Full pass. Interior, event site, security plan, appendices A through E. He turns the tablet around and shows me my own name at the top of a county-stamped document, PASS in the summary field, his license number underneath, and I burst into tears in front of God and Wick and the Mountain Man Musk display.

"You earned it," he says into my hair, arms around me, while I get mascara on the flannel. "Every line. I'd have failed you on the shelf."

"I know you would."

"Eight inches, Sloane."

"I KNOW. It's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me." I laugh-hiccup into his chest, and Danielle chooses this moment to come through from the retail side, register drawer in her arms, take in the tableau — her boss crying on the fire marshal's proxy at the candle bar — and reverse out of the room with the drawer at the stately pace of a royal guard, announcing to the empty doorway, "I saw nothing, I know nothing, my mom already knows everything."

Junie arrives within the hour, because the Woodbridge Falls information network makes fiber optics look like the Pony Express, carrying a bottle of the good prosecco and a paper crown from the party store that says PASSED with the ED in glitter. She makes me wear it. She makes Brady take a picture of us. She makes Brady BE in a picture, which requires negotiation, a countdown, and a ruling that standing near the frame edge "counts," and the photo — me in a glitter crown, Junie mid-toast, a large flannel shoulder entering stage left like weather — goes on the crisis board under a label Danielle letters that night: DAY ZERO. WE ARE SO BACK.

The launch is in eight days and it's real now, stamped and signed and mine, and for approximately thirty-nine minutes my life is a complete structure with no open flames.

Thing two: my phone rings. It's Wes.

"OKAY SO," my brother says, at Wes volume, and I can hear highway. "Kingston field office is officially operational as of yesterday, which means — drumroll — I'm DONE couriering and I have LEAVE saved up, and there is ZERO chance I'm missing my little sister's big night. I'm coming up Wednesday. Full launch week. I'll haul boxes, I'll park cars, I'll wear the flannel, put me to WORK."

The walk-in cooler is forty feet away and I briefly consider living in it.

"Wednesday," I say brightly, at Brady, who has gone drawbridge in a single frame. "The whole — the whole week, wow."

"Also Alden might come to the actual event, half of EPG's seen the posters, Brady's been sending—" a horn, a laugh, "—anyway. Proud of you, Sloanie. See you Wednesday. Tell Brady the group chat misses him!"

Click.

Brady and I look at each other across my stamped, signed, county-certified barn, and the clock we set at eleven days — after the launch, standing up, on purpose — audibly ticks down to five days of my brother sleeping in my guest room with his best friend's spare flannel hanging in my closet.

"Structured," Brady says finally, faintly, like a man rereading his own site plan while it's on fire.