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"That's alarming," Brady says, initialing the last page. "Tell your other venues."

And then — this is the part I'll be retelling at wine night — we unbox the display model, and it's beautiful, black steel and a ring of tempered glass, and I say so, and Brady stands over it with his arms crossed and allows, "It photographs well," which I've learned is Callahan for I have selected an object of great beauty for you. He spends ten more minutes adjusting its feet with a level. An actual level. For a patio.

"You know the ground's not done settling, right?" I say. "You're going to re-level it forty times before launch."

"Yes," he says, contented as a monk, and does another quarter turn on the foot.

"Question," I say, to say anything. "The bandstand."

His wheel measure stops ticking.

"Junie says Ferro came in this morning looking like a rock slide. Bev's telling people it was kids with a firework. Marlene's telling people it was the electrical box. Since the actual county fire marshal apparently CCs you—" I plant the flag, straighten up, and look at him. "Which is it?"

For a second I think he's going to give me the assessor voice, the ongoing-investigation voice. He looks at the ridge instead, northeast, where the trailhead is, and I watch him decide something.

"It wasn't the electrical box," he says. "The bandstand sits in an open park with a hundred feet of mowed grass on every side. Nothing to catch. It burned anyway, at two in the morning, fast, from the base of the steps. That's number six."

"And it's the same — person? Thing?"

"The lab will say." A muscle ticks in his jaw. "But it's a pattern, Sloane. It's been a pattern since number three, and the pattern is: bigger, closer, more public. Whoever this is started with brush nobody saw. Now they're doing landmarks. The bandstand made the county paper this morning, and I'd bet my license that somewhere in this town there's a person cutting that article out very carefully."

The field is bright and cold and full of our little orange flags, and the temperature of the whole morning changes.

"My launch is on every telephone pole on Main Street," I say.

"Yes."

"Two hundred people. Open flame as the entire concept. Sixteen days."

"Yes."

"And that's why you're still here." It comes out of me before I can weigh it, and it lands harder than I mean it to, or exactly as hard as I mean it to. "The daily site visits, the security plan appendix, the — you think my launch is his Super Bowl."

"I think," he says, with the deliberation of a man placing each word on a scale, "that if I wanted an audience, dry fuel, a dozen ignition sources with plausible deniability, and a fire department already stretched over forty square miles, I couldn't design a better night than yours."

"Oh my God. Okay." I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. Three years. Every dollar. One hundred and ninety tickets. "You're not going to shut it down. Tell me the plan isn't shutting it down⁠—"

"The plan is the opposite." And when I drop my hands, he's stepped closer — inside the Victorians-with-a-paint-pen radius, close enough that I have to look up. "Access control at the gate. Ignition monitoring. Ferro's people on site, EPG coverage if I ask for it, and me. Nobody touches your night, Sloane. Not the weather, not the county, not—" the smallest pause, a flag planted in it, "—anyone. It happens. It happens safely. That's the plan."

There's a version of me — three weeks ago's version — who would have heard all that as one long, elaborate citation. Today's version hears it the way it's aimed, and today's version has a heart rate situation developing, standing in her own field, in the cold, being looked at like that by a man holding a wheel measure.

"Why?" I ask, and it comes out smaller and truer than I plan. "It's a candle party in a field, Brady. You've got an actual case. A whole county. Why is my launch the thing you're⁠—"

"Because it's the best target in the county," he says. Flat. Fast. Assessor voice.

"That's the whole reason?"

The wind moves through the flags. He looks at me for a long moment, and I watch him stand at the top of a very tall ladder of a sentence, and not say it, and climb carefully back down.

"That's the assessment," he says.

Which is not a no. Which is a man in flannel telling me a candle is not about him. I'm learning to read this language and it's setting my whole curriculum on fire.

"Okay," I say. Steady. Mostly steady. "But if there's a security guy at my gate, he's wearing flannel. It's an aesthetic event, Brady."

The almost-smile makes it further than I've ever seen it. Ninety percent of the way to shore.

"I'll put it in the appendix," he says.