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WADE

It’s nine o’clock, and the last of the dead pine is a twenty-foot trunk standing alone in the corner of her lot. Forty feet of open air on one side and Nikki’s canopy on the other.

This is the part I don’t hand off.

The crown came down easy yesterday, piece by piece off the top. What’s left is the hard part—the whole standing trunk, and only one safe direction for it to fall. Toward the ditch, away from the canvas. Everything I do in the next ten minutes is about making sure it goes one way and not the other.

“Zone’s clear,” Deacon calls from the gravel. “You’re good.”

I set my first cut low on the ditch side, a wide notch angled down, opening a mouth in the trunk that tells the tree which way to lean. Then I move around back and start the cut that’ll drop it, slowly, watching the gap the whole time. A dead trunk can split or kick if you rush it. I don’t rush it.

The saw’s loud enough that I don’t hear her come up. I feel it—the quiet where her noise usually is. I glance up mid-cut and she’s at the edge of the zone, both hands over her mouth, not saying a word.

That’s what gets me. Not that she’s watching. That she’s stopped talking.

I kill the saw for a second. “Back up two steps. You’re fine there, but back up two steps.”

She backs up two steps. Her hands stay over her mouth.

“It’s coming down that way.” I point with the bar, toward the empty ditch. “Not this way. It can’t come this way. I already told it where to go.”

“You told it.” Her voice comes out thin. “You told the tree.”

“With the notch. That mouth I cut. It leans where the mouth is.” I don’t know why I’m explaining. I don’t normally explain. But she’s gone pale under the freckles and I’d say more than I’ve said all week if it put the color back. “Watch. It’ll go slow first, then all at once, and it’ll be in that ditch. Ten seconds. You want to keep watching or you want to look away.”

“I’m not looking away.” She lowers her hands an inch. “You go up forty-foot dead trees for a living and I sell pie. I can watch a tree.”

Her chin’s up, and it does something to me—a pull low in the gut, warm and insistent. She won’t look away, and I want to close the forty feet between us. Since I have a running saw in my hands, I don’t.

I finish the cut. The trunk stands one breath on nothing—then the top tips, exactly toward the mouth I gave it, and comes down into the ditch with a crack and a thud I feel through my boots. Dust rolls up off the gravel. Dead branches settle.

Then it’s quiet. Real quiet. The strip holding still around us.

I look over. Both of Nikki’s hands are pressed flat to the top of her head, staring at the trunk in the ditch. When she turns to me, her eyes are too bright.

“Don’t,” she says.

“Don’t what.”

“Do that again where I can see it. My heart can’t—” She stops. Pulls a breath. Puts the bright away and the grin back on, but I saw it, and she knows I saw it. “That was terrifying and also the single most competent thing I’ve ever watched a human being do. I just need a moment.”

“It was never going to come this way.”

“You knew that. I didn’t know that. Those are different experiences, Wade.”

Deacon’s laughing from the chipper. Rye’s already moving in on the downed trunk to buck it. I pull my gloves off. I should go help them, but I don’t, because she still has a hand pressed to her head, and I’d rather stand here.

“You want the stump ground now or you want to open your propane and I move the truck first?” Deacon calls. “And you texting Matt back about tomorrow or am I. He wants to know your event order for the regional.”

“You,” I say.

“He wants it from you. It’s your title to defend.”

“Tell him the order I always run.” I don’t take my eyes off Nikki. “You know it.”

Deacon knows it. Deacon’s ridden to six regionals in my passenger seat. He also knows I’m not walking away from this canopy to talk lineup, and he lets it drop with a look I’ll hear about later.