Page 34

"Sloane—"

"You'll be up all night anyway." I try to smile. It goes badly. "Guard the county. I've got the kitchen."

The drive home is eleven minutes of highway noise and my brother's jaw working in the dash light.

I try twice. The first time I get as far as "Wes—" and he turns the radio on. Classic rock, at a volume that constitutes a legal position. The second time, at the light by the pharmacy, I reach over and turn it off, and he stares straight ahead through the windshield and says, "Ten years," not to me, to the intersection, like he's reading it off the traffic signal. "He said ten years. I've been — we've done TRIPS, Sloane. I made him be my best man for a wedding that didn't even HAPPEN. Ten years he's been—" and then the light changes and he shuts it all back inside and drives, and that's somehow worse than the yelling, because Wes not-talking is a natural disaster in the wrong direction, water pulling back off the beach.

The explosion, when it finally comes, happens in my kitchen with his hands flat on the counter — and it's not the one I braced for.

"THREE WEEKS?" He wheels around. "There's been a — a THING, a whole THING, under my — I ATE DINNER WITH YOU PEOPLE. Multiple dinners! I made him smell the CANDLE, Sloane! I stood in that barn making jokes about — everyone knew, didn't they? Danielle knew. JUNIE knew. Bev — oh my God, Bev's been patting my arm all week, I thought she had a thing about my jacket—" He's pacing now, full Wes weather system. "My best friend and my sister, and I found out from a LOOK. At a BAR. Like I'm — like I'm the town, like I'm somebody you manage⁠—"

"That's not⁠—"

"I'm not mad you're together!" It comes out of him loud enough to startle us both, and he stands there breathing. And there it is — the actual wound, out on the counter between us. "Do you get that? I'm not — God, if you'd told me, if either one of you had ever once — he's the best man I know, Sloane, I've been trying to get him to come around more for a DECADE, and you—" his voice cracks, furious about it, "—you're my favorite person alive, and the two of you looked at each other and decided, what? That I couldn't be trusted with it? That I'd — what did you think I'd DO?"

"It wasn't about what you'd do⁠—"

"Then WHAT⁠—"

"HE STAYED AWAY FROM ME FOR TEN YEARS BECAUSE OF YOU."

Silence. The refrigerator hums. Wick flees the kitchen like a civilian clearing a blast radius.

"Not because you asked him to," I say, quieter, but I'm lit now, three weeks of guilt converting to something with a point on it. "Because you never had to. Because he decided your friendship meant I was off-limits, and then he spent a DECADE paying for it — every tent pole, every holiday he skipped, every family thing where you'd say 'why doesn't Brady come around,' Wes, that was him, keeping a promise you never even knew he made. And I spent those years thinking the man didn't like me, adjusting MYSELF around it — so when it finally broke, three weeks ago, in my barn, both of us already half-wrecked over each other for ten years — yeah. We got it wrong. We should have stood up Sunday like we planned instead of getting caught on a Wednesday by your — your evidence face. But before you stand in my kitchen listing everyone who knew before you, ask yourself the real question." I'm crying now, hate it, keep going. "Would you rather he'd spent another ten years miserable at the far end of tents, so you never had to feel weird at a booth? Because that was the other plan on the table. That was the only other plan he had."

My brother stares at me. Thirty-two years, I know every face he owns, and this one's new — anger with nowhere to land, arriving, over and over, at people it loves.

"I need to walk," he says, hoarse, and takes his jacket, and the porch door bangs, and his boots crunch away down the dark gravel toward town, and I stand in my kitchen shaking.

Wick reappears in the doorway once the volume drops, checks the room like a claims adjuster, and escorts me to the sink while I run water I don't drink. My grandmother's kitchen. Thanksgivings at that table. Wes at nine, at nineteen, at thirty, always the loudest chair — and tonight he walked out of it because of me, and the house is so quiet I can hear the porch clock, and I hate every tick of it.

The phone buzzes on the counter. Brady: Are you okay?

I stare at it a long time, thumb hovering, no idea what's true.

What I finally send, at 11:52: He walked to town. He's not okay. I'm not okay. Nobody threw anything. He said he's not mad we're together, he's mad we hid it, and the worst part is he's right, and the other worst part is I'd hide it again to protect the same three people. Don't come over. If his walk loops back and your truck's here it starts the second round, and I can't referee tonight.

Three dots. A long time. Then: Understood. Then, a minute later, because he is who he is: Cameras green. Rotation logged at 11:15. Lock the doors.

And then, third text, alone in its own bubble like it took separate courage: Whatever it costs. I meant it. Ten years I chose him over you because I thought I had to choose. I'm not doing another ten of anybody choosing. Goodnight, Sloane.

I read it eleven times. I do not sleep, but for a different reason than I expected to not sleep.

Because here's what surfaces, somewhere past midnight, over the sound of my brother not coming back yet: nobody has ever fought about me like this. That's a strange thing to hold. Two men who love me, in a knot on my kitchen counter, and the whole fight — every syllable of it — is about who was protecting whom too hard. My brother's mad because he'd have carried it. Brady carried it a decade so nobody else had to. And I'm standing in the middle of all this ferocious, idiotic, load-bearing care, crying into a dish towel at midnight, luckiest woman in the stupid county.

Sleep declines my application, so I do what I do: I go to work.

The barn at midnight is my favorite church anyway — lamps low, melter off, two hundred numbered jars racked and gleaming, launch in sixty-four hours. I detail-wipe lids. I straighten the gate list Danielle laminated. I tell Wick, who took point on the candle bar, "He'll cool off. He walks, he eats something enormous, he comes back and hugs too hard. It's a system," and Wick flicks his tail like a metronome set to we'll see.

At 12:53, three things happen inside the same minute.

Wick goes up — full vertical, ears flat, fixed on the north window.

My phone shrieks. Not a text tone: the camera app, the one Brady installed with his own hands, red banner, MOTION + HEAT — CAM 4, NORTH FENCE.

And underneath it all, faint through the window seals, I smell it. Woodsmoke. Wrong woodsmoke — not chimney, not Orchard Bonfire. Green wood and gasoline arrogance, the kind of smell that doesn't ask permission.

I'm at the window in two strides. Out past the equipment shed, along the north fence where the grass was flattened by boots that stood there facing my barn — flame. A line of it, low and fast and orange, crawling the dry fence-line grass with the wind behind it, twenty feet of it already, headed for the shed. Headed for the shed with the mower fuel, forty feet from the field, ninety from my barn.