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“Wade.” I come around the counter. “You’re going to have to let me thank you. I know it’s against your religion. Brace yourself.”

His jaw shifts. He’s bracing.

“Thank you,” I say.

I blurt the words out, plain as day, then watch it hit harder than any joke I’ve thrown all day. He goes still. His gaze lifts to mine and stays there. For a second, neither of us has a thing to fill the quiet with, and the quiet doesn’t feel like a door shutting anymore. It feels like the opposite. It feels like a room I’ve been let into.

“You’re welcome,” he says.

Two words, and I can tell they don’t come easy to him. He has to work for them. And he keeps working for them, keeps handing them to me, and I have no idea what to do with a man who gives me the exact thing he’s worst at.

“Okay, well, now you’ve ruined me,” I say, backing up to safe ground behind my counter. “Because I’m going to burn through this in three days, and then what? I get attached to a wood supply and it drives off to go win a lumberjack contest.”

“You’ll want a cord,” he says. “For the season. Quarter cord a week if you’re running that kettle daily, more on weekends.”

“Is that a lot? That sounds like a lot. I don’t know wood. I know pie.”

“It’s a lot.” Something at the corner of his mouth moves, almost. “It’s a season.”

“Then bring me a cord, tree man. Seasoned, dry, whatever the right word is—I’m trusting you completely, which you should know is not a thing I do with men who won’t finish a sentence.” I grab my chalk, mostly to have something in my hand. “What do I owe you?”

“I’ll figure it when I deliver.”

“That’s not a number.”

“It’s a fair one.”

He’s watching me chalk nothing onto the board, and we’re both aware, I think, that I’ve just hired him to come back after the job’s done. That the tree’ll be gone tomorrow and the wood is the reason he’ll keep pulling up to my curb through October.

Neither of us says that part. He’s not going to. I’m not brave enough.

“Cord it is,” I say. “First delivery when?”

“Weekend. After the regional.”

The regional. Thursday. Him gone at dawn, the whole valley cheering a man who won’t take a compliment from me, and me here flipping my sign to OPEN for the first time. The two days keep getting closer every time I think about them.

“Right,” I say. “The big show.”

He doesn’t answer that. He tucks the wedge roll under his arm and looks at my stand—the pumpkins, the lights, the little chalk joke about weeping—and I’d give a lot to know what’s happening behind that face. I can’t read a single line of it.

That’s the part that gets under my skin. I can read a customer at forty feet. I can read my mother’s disappointment through a phone. I cannot read this man, and I’ve started wanting to, and I know exactly where that wanting leads. I spent my whole childhood reading my father’s quiet and calling it steady, telling myself a man who didn’t need to fill the air was a man with something solid underneath.

Then the quiet got up one day and left, and it turned out that was all it had ever been—a man already halfway to the door, and me the last to know. He didn’t slam anything. He just went quieter and quieter until the house was one person emptier and no one had said the first word about it.

That’s how this goes. The silent ones aren’t deep. They’re leaving, and you’re the last to know.

“Nine o’clock tomorrow,” he says. “Pumpkins clear. We drop the spar, grind the stump, and we’re out of your hair by noon.”

“And then I don’t see you until the weekend.”

I don’t mean to say it. It’s out before I can dress it up as a joke—bare and a little too honest—and it hangs there in the gold light between us.

Wade holds my eyes. For once, he doesn’t rush to fill the gap, and for once, I get the sense he’s choosing the quiet instead of hiding in it.

“Weekend,” he says. Then, lower, like he’s paying full price for it, he adds, “Sooner, if the kettle acts up.”

He climbs into the truck. The diesel turns over. And I stand in my almost-ready stand with my hand on a stack of wood a silent man split for me, watching his taillights go, feeling something shift in me that I don’t have the good sense to be scared of yet.