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The last taillights leave at ten forty. Wes takes the cashbox to the house under armed escort — Wick — and Junie hugs Sloane so long it becomes structural, and then it's just me, doing the final walk-down: pits drowned and stirred and drowned again, tables valved off, coals cold. The assessor's benediction.

I find her in the barn.

She's in the middle of the emptied floor, surrounded by the beautiful wreckage of it — bare racks, drifting guest tags, one abandoned tiara — with a single candle lit on the workbench because of course this woman's idea of winding down is more open flame. Jar 001. She kept the first one for herself. Its light does things to her face that I intend to spend several decades documenting.

She hears me come in and doesn't turn around — knows my footsteps now, another entry in the mutual file — and when I reach her she leans back into me on contact, automatic, like the two of us are a load path that finally got engineered right.

"Final walk-down complete?" she asks the candle.

"Pits cold. Valves off. Gate log closed at two hundred eleven souls, zero incidents, one deputy who left with more candles than a deputy should be able to carry."

"That's Kowalski. He's building a case for his mother-in-law." She spins in my arms, and up close she's all banked fire — exhausted, lit, smelling like her own product line. "Say the rest. I know there's a rest. You've had assessor face since the pergola."

"Two hundred eleven people stood in a field tonight because you were too stubborn to hear no." I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, two fingers, the original crime. "I've cleared a lot of scenes, Sloane. I've never once handed the keys back to somebody and thought, this is the safest place in the county. It is, for the record. As of tonight. Safest place in the county."

Her eyes go bright. "Because you're in it?"

"Because we both are."

"We sold OUT," she says, wrecked and hoarse from six hours of being everyone's favorite person, holding up her clipboard like a championship belt. "There's a WAITING list. Bev's sister ordered a CASE. Alden—" she starts laughing, wobbly, punch-drunk, "—Alden bought six of you, Brady. The man owns six of you now⁠—"

"I saw. I'm invoicing EPG for royalties."

She sets the clipboard down and fits herself back against me, wax and smoke and triumph, right in the spot ten years of engineering said she'd never stand, and we sway there in the candlelight to the tick of the cooling melter, to no music at all.

"Ten years," I say into her hair, because tonight's the night for filing it clean. "I spent ten years thinking you were off-limits."

She tips her head back and looks up at me, firelit, smug, mine.

"I'm glad you finally figured out I wasn't," she says. "Took long enough. You're supposed to be good at investigating."

"The evidence was compromised. Investigator had a conflict of interest."

"Mm. Had?"

"Has," I say. "Permanent. Unresolvable. I've stopped reporting it."

She grins, and she's about to say something that will require citation when my pocket lights up — three ascending tones, Channel 1031, loud in the empty barn, the sound that has ended every almost we've ever had.

I take the phone out. Sloane watches, eyebrows up, already resigned, already reaching for my kit bag like she'll walk me to the truck.

I look at the screen. Non-urgent. Regional. Somebody else's standpipe.

I silence it without reading the rest, and set it face-down on the workbench next to jar 001 of 200, and pull her back in.

Sloane Mercer laughs — the seal bark, the real one, my favorite sound in any county — and the candle throws our shadow twenty feet up the barn wall, one shape, finally, after ten years of standing at opposite ends of tents.

Outside, the last coals are dead and drowned, the county is quiet, and somewhere in a holding cell a small man is explaining his fires to anyone who'll listen, because they were the biggest thing he ever made.

He's wrong about that too. The biggest thing anyone ever made in this county is standing in a converted barn with wax on her hands and my heart in her inventory, laughing at her own cat.

Some fires, I'm learning, are worth the risk.

Epilogue

Brady

The Following April