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Then I look up, and there she is.

She's humming. I can't hear it, not through the defenders, but I can see her mouth shaping it. Steady, in B-flat. Her eyes are locked to mine across the drifting smoke and they don't waver. She isn't afraid. She isn't fixing me. She's just there, a solid, warm, certain fact in a red dress.

The white light folds itself back down.

Two.

Alfred rams the second charge. My hands are shaking on the lanyard. I let them. I settle my feet. The smoke thins and swirls. From the crowd I catch the corner of a child's delighted face, the cow, hopping from foot to foot with both hands over her ears.

I pull. The second shot rolls out across the green, off the maples, off the steeple, and comes back from the Granary wall in a deep echo that rattles the orchard Hollis painted there. Somewhere, a tuba plays three bars of something triumphant and wrong.

Three.

I'm breathing too fast. I slow it. In for four, out for four. I look at the woman at the rope and she lifts her chin a quarter inch. I realize I'm smiling. It's a stupid, helpless smile, the expression of a man who is frightened and in love and has noticed both at once.

She sees it. Her face goes bright as a lamp.

I pull. The third shot goes through me, and I'm still standing.

Four.

Alfred packs the last charge. He looks up at me from under the brim of his hat. It's a plain, kind look. He doesn't say anything.

I take the lanyard. I don't think about the fifth Bunny wanted. I don't think about the dry bright place. I think about a porch light, burning in the afternoon.

The fourth shot is the longest. It rolls out over the roofs of Larkspur Lane and the creek and the gold valley. When it's gone, the quiet comes down over the Common like a hand laid gently on a head. I stand with the lanyard slack in my fist and smoke drifting past my hat.

Applause rises around me, thick and warm. A child shrieks with joy. My chest is still working. I'm still here.

I lift the defenders off my ears, and the first thing I hear, clear and close, is her.

"Come here," Hollis says.

She's under the rope before Bunny can open her mouth about the rope. She's across the grass in five strides with her skirt swinging. She takes my face in both hands, scarred and shaking and wet under the tricorn, and kisses me.

There's nobody to perform it for. It's her mouth, warm and sure and tasting faintly of honey. Her hands curled in my collar. The soft weight of her pressed against my chest in front of a green full of people. I wrap my arms around her and lift her an inch off the grass.

She laughs against my mouth.

Somewhere off to the left, a donut cart rattles, and a voice rings out across the Common like a bell.

"THAT'S MY GIRL!"

"Carmen," Hollis says, against my lips.

"I know."

"She has no shame."

"It's a gift," I say, and she laughs again and kisses me once more, quick and hard, and sets her feet down.

My hands are still shaking. She takes them in hers, the scarred one and the other, and looks at them. She doesn't say anything. She rubs her thumb across my knuckles in slow strokes until the trembling eases, one at a time, like smoothing a wrinkle out of a sheet.

I stand there and let her. The smoke clears. The crowd goes back to its pie.

"Four," she says.

"They always ask for five."