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Here's what I learn about myself at 12:54 a.m.: the scream stays in its jar. What comes out instead, in my own voice, weirdly steady, is his.

Call it in. Then fight it only if it's small, only from the black side, never let it flank you.

"911, what's your—" "Fire, 44 Beecher Hollow Road, fence line spreading toward a structure, RUSH IT," and I'm already moving, phone on speaker, into boots, out the barn's side door into cold air full of smoke and sparks lifting off my own fence like the world's worst launch preview. Dispatch says six minutes. The fire is not offering six minutes.

The wheeled extinguisher is at the shed corner, exactly where the drills put it, next to the charged garden line Brady specced with a brass nozzle "for a dedicated water supply," and I hated the ugly reel and he made me keep it, and I could kiss the ugly reel. I hit the leading edge the way Danielle and I practiced on a Tuesday while tourists watched — low, sweeping, cutting the fire off from the shed first, then working the line, steam and chemical fog and my arms shaking, screaming at it a little, frankly, "NOT THIS WEEK, PAL⁠—"

Headlights swing wild into the driveway. A truck door doesn't so much open as detonate.

"SLOANE—" Brady, at a dead run, taking the scene in with one long professional sweep even at speed — her, upwind, black side, extinguisher, shed wet, line holding — and I watch fifteen years of training fight naked terror to a draw across his face in firelight. He's beside me in the next second, hands over mine on the nozzle, redirecting the stream to the flank I couldn't see. "Cameras hit my phone — I was already driving — you're okay—" it's not a question, it's a thing he's telling his own chest, "—you're okay."

"He came early," I gasp. "He came EARLY, the launch is SATURDAY, that's — that's CHEATING⁠—"

And then the sirens are real, two engines and a rotation car, and the field goes red-and-blue, and hoses do in ninety seconds what my arms had been begging to do for four minutes — and past the fence, at the tree line, flashlights converge, and there's shouting, and a figure in a reflective vest breaks from the dark at a flat sprint. He gets thirty feet.

Deputy Ferro tackles a man into my chrysanthemums.

It's not graceful. It's not a movie tackle. It's two hundred pounds of county law enforcement arriving like a filing deadline, and the reflective vest goes down hard in the flower bed my grandmother planted, and two more deputies land on the pile, and somewhere in it a voice — high, indignant, nothing like what my nightmares had been casting for the role — yells, "I was HELPING! I saw the fire and I was COMING TO HELP⁠—"

"You're wearing a VEST, Dale," Ferro bellows back, wrenching his hands behind him, and the name reaches me across the field before the man's face does. Dale. The firebug of Woodbridge Falls, the countdown under my whole October, is named Dale.

"He had a whole—" I say to Brady, numb, watching them haul him upright, "— he came dressed. He brought a costume to my⁠—"

"They always come dressed." His arm doesn't loosen. His eyes don't leave the cuffs. "One way or another."

They walk him past us in cuffs, and I get one look at him in the strobing light — thirties, ordinary, soft-faced, a vest with SAFETY STAFF stenciled on it that no one issued him, eyes going everywhere, at the engines, at the firefighters, hungry, like even now, even in handcuffs, he can't stop watching the crew work the thing he made — and then Ferro turns him away, and he's just a narrow back in the doorway of a cruiser. Dale Prewitt. I'll learn the name tomorrow. Tonight he's only the answer to a question Brady asked enough times.

"Fuel can at the fence, gloves in his pocket, and cam four got the pour on video," Ferro calls over, spitting a chrysanthemum petal, grinning like a hydrant. "Hands dirty. DA's getting his confession scene after all. Nice water supply, Mercer."

I look at my shed — scorched at one corner, standing. My field, my flags, my barn, standing. My hands, black to the wrist, shaking now that they're allowed to.

Brady peels the nozzle out of them, sets it down, and folds me in — smoke and flannel and his heart still sprinting under my ear — right there in front of Ferro and both engine crews and the whole strobing world, no protocol, no four compliant feet, his mouth pressed to my hair, saying my name like a man doing inventory of the only thing on the property that matters.

"You fought it," he says into my hair, and there's something wrecked and marveling in it. "You called it in, you took the black side, you held the line off the shed. Four minutes, alone, in the dark."

"I had a good instructor. He's very thorough. It's a whole thing in town."

His laugh comes out cracked down the middle, half pride, half delayed terror, and his arms tighten like ratchet straps.

Which is exactly the tableau my brother runs into, breathless, wild-eyed, jacket flapping — Wes, who saw the glow from Main Street and sprinted the whole way — and stops dead at the gate, taking it in: the steaming fence, the cuffed man in the cruiser, his best friend's arms around his little sister like load-bearing architecture.

Nobody moves for a second.

"Okay," Wes says finally, ragged, to no one, to everyone, "we're doing the family meeting NOW."

Chapter 15

Sloane

The family meeting happens at 2 a.m., at my kitchen table, over the enormous sandwiches my brother builds when his hands need a job — one for each of us, unasked, which in Mercer is a whole paragraph.

It starts, because this family is what it is, with logistics. Wes needs to know the shed's structural status. Brady gives it to him in assessor. Wes needs to know what happens to Dale — arraignment Monday, Ferro's confident, the video is "prosecutorial poetry." Wes nods along, chewing, hiding in the facts the same way Brady hides in the flat voice, and I watch the two of them speak fluent avoidance at each other across my table and understand suddenly why they've been best friends for twenty years.

Then Wes puts his sandwich down and says, "Okay," and looks at Brady. "The fence is out of danger. So talk."

Nobody performs. We're all too scorched for it. Wes sits across from Brady with his hair full of chrysanthemum debris and listens — actually listens, no weather, chin on his fist — while Brady lays the whole decade out in that flat voice that I now know means the burn underneath is enormous. The Fourth of July. The promise nobody asked him to make. Ten years of tent poles. Three weeks of casserole. The plan to stand up Sunday, on purpose, that a corner booth beat by four days.

"You big idiot," Wes says at last, thick, to his best friend. "You could've just — a decade, man. You were family the whole time. That was already true. You could've had—" he gestures at the kitchen, at me, at all of it, and can't finish, and doesn't have to.