Page 6

By midnight there's a divider for every disaster he named and a few he hasn't found yet, because if he's going to discover my attic wiring eventually, I'd rather hand it to him myself with a solution already stapled to it. Exhibit A: electrician's quote, requested tonight, flagged urgent. Exhibit B: flammables cabinet, two-day shipping, screenshot attached. Exhibit C: flame-retardant treatment for decorative fabric, ordered, with the safety data sheet printed because I bet he's the kind of man who gets feelings about safety data sheets.

Wick supervises from the top of the refrigerator, tail flicking like a metronome set to disapproval.

"This is not about him," I tell Wick, hole-punching with unnecessary force. "This is about the launch. This is about two hundred people and three years of work. The fact that it will also ruin his day is a bonus. A large bonus."

Wick's tail flicks.

"I am not thinking about the forearms."

Flick.

I go to bed at one in the morning with printer-warm paper smell in my nose and one thought circling like a moth that won't commit to the porch light: In a county that's had four unexplained fires in eight weeks. The way his voice dropped when he said it. Like it was personal.

Everyone else in Woodbridge Falls talks about those fires like weather.

Tomorrow morning, nine a.m., the human thundercloud comes back to my barn expecting a fight over bunting.

He's getting a binder.

Chapter 3

Brady

She's getting a what?

That's my first thought at 9:00 a.m. sharp, standing in the barn doorway, because Sloane Mercer is waiting for me at her candle bar with coffee, a smile that should require a permit, and a three-inch pink binder with tab dividers.

The binder says CALLAHAN on the spine. In glitter pen.

"Good morning," she says, in the tone generals use for we have you surrounded. "I made you a copy."

I've done over four hundred assessments. I have been screamed at by a marina owner, threatened by a man whose fireworks warehouse I red-tagged two days before the Fourth, and once, memorably, bitten by a client's emu. Nobody has ever made me a binder.

I set my kit down and open it, because it would be unprofessional to do what I want to do, which is stand here looking at her like the last ten years never happened.

Tab one: ELECTRICAL, and behind it, an emailed quote from a licensed electrician in Hunter — dated 11:58 last night — for a dedicated circuit and hardwired lighting. Tab two: FLAMMABLE STORAGE, with a purchase confirmation for a code-compliant cabinet and, stapled behind it, the safety data sheets for every fragrance oil she stocks. Tab three: THE BUNTING SITUATION, which contains an order for flame-retardant treatment and a note in the margin that says told you it could stay cute.

There are nine tabs. Nine. Tabbed in a gradient, keyed to the violations in the exact order I named them yesterday, which means she reverse-engineered my documentation system overnight from memory. It took the state of New Jersey four years to learn my documentation system. The ninth is labeled THINGS YOU HAVEN'T FOUND YET, BECAUSE I'M NOT HIDING ANYTHING, and it flags her own attic wiring.

I go through it twice. She waits, arms crossed, one eyebrow up, radiating the specific patience of someone watching a trap they built work perfectly.

"Well?" she says.

"Your electrician's quote doesn't include a permit rider."

"Page two."

It's on page two. "The cabinet's undersized if you're keeping your current oil inventory."

"I'm not. Half of it's moving to the house basement, which — tab six — has the storage specs already."

"The fabric treatment's rated for one season. It'll need reapplication."

"Which is why there's a calendar reminder screenshotted behind the receipt." She leans against the bar. "Keep going. I stayed up till one. I want my money's worth."

Here's the problem. I came here today with a preliminary list of forty-one items, a plan to be thorough, impersonal, and gone by Friday, and the professional certainty that a woman who names a product Mountain Man Musk would fight me on the science.

Instead she met the science head-on and brought receipts, and the only thing I can find wrong with her binder is that it's pink. She's not fighting the assessment. She's out-assessing me. And I'm standing in a barn that smells like vanilla and woodsmoke, discovering that competence is apparently the one thing I have no defense against, which ten years of careful planning somehow failed to anticipate.