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"I'm seeing ember transport onto a thirty-year-old roof." He looks at the barn, and there's something underneath the flatness of it. "You built something good. I've stood in a lot of places the morning after someone found out how fast good things burn."

Great. Wonderful. Yesterday this man was a rude ghost with a nice truck. Now he's a haunted fire priest who thinks my dream is beautiful and flammable, and I have to sit here on his tailgate recalibrating every family gathering since I was twenty-two.

"The fire pits," I say. "That's really a no."

"That's really a no. But." He straightens up, and takes out the tablet, and turns it around so I can see the sketch on it — when did he even do this — my field, my seating clusters, my light poles, all of it laid out the way I described. Except the six wood pits are gone, and in their place there's something else, drawn in clean engineer lines. "Propane fire tables. Rated, enclosed flame, auto-shutoff, no embers. You can get them with lava rock, glass, whatever fits the—" he actually says the next word like it costs him money, "—aesthetic. Two pits on the patio hardscape could stay wood-burning if you cover the pergola in ember mesh and keep a dedicated water supply. You'd keep the glow. Lose the airborne fire hazard."

I look at the sketch for a long time.

Here's the thing. I know how to be told no. I've got a whole system for it — nod, smile, go home, get spiteful, find the workaround. What I do not have a system for is this: somebody looking at my dream, taking it seriously enough to redraw it, and handing it back still recognizably mine.

"You did this during your marina call," I say.

"Valve specs don't take a whole brain."

"You drew my launch during a valve call." I hand the tablet back before my face does something embarrassing. "I want two wood pits, not — fine, the pergola mesh, yes. And the fire tables better be the good ones, because if my launch photos look like a hotel patio in Scottsdale, I'm citing YOU."

"Send me your layout file tonight. I'll spec it."

"Fine."

"Fine."

He picks up his kit, nods at me — the sheriff nod, except it doesn't read like dismissal anymore, it reads like punctuation — and drives off down my gravel like a man who has never once in his life laughed at a seal bark.

I sit on my own porch steps for a while after that.

"Wick," I say eventually. Wick is upside down in the chrysanthemums, being no help. "I think I've had him filed wrong for ten years."

Wick stretches one paw toward the sun, which is either agreement or a muscle spasm.

Because here's the file I've been keeping without admitting I keep files. The way he drank the coffee I guessed wrong this morning rather than correct me, and then, when I caught the tell and handed him a corrected cup an hour later, said nothing, but his whole face did paperwork about it. The way he crouches to check an outlet and his hands go careful and certain, like the outlet deserves his full respect. The way he hasn't smiled once — not once, I've been counting, it's a whole spreadsheet — but when I make a joke, his eyes do this thing, this warming thing, like a pilot light catching, and then he frowns harder like the warmth was a code violation.

Two years ago, at my cousin Dana's wedding, I watched him spend four hours holding up a tent pole.

I remember it in the specific way you remember injuries. I was at the singles table in a dress I loved, and Brady Callahan stood at the far end of the reception tent in a gray suit, and every time the crowd shifted him closer to my orbit he'd migrate, casually, tectonically, back to that pole. At some point Dana's aunt tried to drag him onto the dance floor and he declined so politely she came back to our table and called him "such a serious young man" in the tone women use for lighthouses. I'd had two glasses of prosecco and one bad idea, and I got as far as standing up. He looked at me across the tent — one second, maybe less — and then turned and helped the caterer carry a folding table nobody needed carried.

I sat back down. I told myself: filed, closed, whatever.

I did not, apparently, close the file.

"This is a problem, Wick," I say. "He's here to grade my barn. There's a rubric. I don't even LIKE serious men, I like — fun men. Men who dance. Men whose entire emotional register isn't a beard with a clipboard."

Wick rolls over in the chrysanthemums, exposing his belly to the sky, the picture of a creature who has never once lied to himself.

"Okay, that's hurtful," I tell him, and go inside to do my pour counts.

The pour counts do not go well. I catch myself at the kitchen table drawing a small propane fire table in the margin of my order sheet, with little decorative lava rocks, and I put the pen down like it's evidence.

Junie shows up at seven with a bottle of malbec and the barometric sensitivity of a lifelong best friend. She runs Steep Grade Coffee, which means she hears everything in this town before it happens, and she comes through my kitchen door already talking.

"Okay, so Bev was in at four," she says, setting down the wine, "and according to Bev, there is a, quote, 'giant broody government man' doing a 'full investigation' at your property, and Marlene told her he's been here every day this week, and by tomorrow the story is going to be that you're under federal indictment or engaged, depending on which end of the church parking lot it comes out of." She pulls two glasses out of my cabinet like she owns them, which by common law she does. "I said I'd go straight to the source. Talk."

"He's an insurance assessor."

"Bev says he's six-four."

"He's an insurance assessor who's six-four." I take my glass. "It's Brady."