Page 7

"It's a start," I say.

Her jaw drops. "A start? That binder is a masterpiece. That binder deserves its own launch party."

"Items twelve through forty-one," I say, and hand her my list.

She takes it the way a general accepts terms — already reading, already flipping for weaknesses — and points at the coffee she made me without breaking eye contact with item fourteen.

"Drink that before it goes cold," she says absently, and starts annotating my list with her glitter pen, and I stand in the middle of her barn experiencing what I can only describe as a structural event.

We fight our way through the barn item by item, and I need to state, for the record of whatever tribunal eventually reviews my conduct, that I tried to make it boring.

I can't. She won't let anything be boring.

We argue about egress and she paces off the exit paths herself, counting under her breath, and then concedes the back exit needs the stack of pallets moved — "fine, FINE, they're gone by Friday" — like she's negotiating a hostage release. We argue about her drying racks and she wins, because the spacing math is right and I tell her so, and she does a small victory spin on one heel that I will be thinking about at unhelpful hours for the rest of my life.

We argue about the candle bar itself, and that one gets loud.

"It's supervised open flame in a retail setting⁠—"

"It's a tealight in a rated glass cup at arm's length from an adult human who signed a waiver⁠—"

"Whose blood alcohol, in the case of yesterday's clientele, was a rounding error away from being flammable itself."

"That," she says, pointing a wick trimmer at me, "was a bachelorette party, they are a protected class in this town, and Brianna's pour was structurally perfect and you know it."

"I don't know it. I wasn't here."

"Well, whose fault is that? You could've been here at two. You showed up at four like a man who had to circle the county talking himself into it."

I say nothing, because the accuracy is uncalled for.

She notices. She notices everything — I'm compiling a file on that. She notices when I test her floorboards near the melter and my boot finds the one spongy plank she's been meaning to fix; she has the lumber receipt on her phone before I finish frowning. She notices when I check the mounting height on her extinguishers and can't find a violation, and she savors it, leaning against the wall with her coffee like she's watching sports.

And she notices, unfortunately, the thing that happens at the fragrance organ.

It happens because she wants to show me the setup for the launch's custom-blend station, and she pulls the stopper out of an amber bottle and holds it up, and says, "Smell this and then tell me my launch shouldn't happen," and I lean in like a fool.

Warm vanilla. Smoke under it — not the smoke I work with, not the wet-char stink of a ruined kitchen, but sweet applewood smoke, campfire smoke, Fourth of July smoke, and underneath that something that's just her, because she's ten inches away with her wrist turned up and her eyes on my face, waiting to be told she's right.

"It's called Orchard Bonfire," she says. "It's the signature scent for the launch. I'm doing a limited run of two hundred, numbered, and I — what?"

"Nothing." I straighten up. Recalibrate. The barn is about four degrees warmer, which I do not note on the tablet. "The blend station needs a drip tray. Non-combustible."

"You lost your train of thought," she says.

"I didn't."

"You did. Mid-sentence. I watched it leave the station." She restoppers the bottle, and she's grinning now, and it's the Fourth of July grin, the one that started all of this, aimed at me from ten inches instead of across a fire pit. "The famous Callahan focus. Undone by a vanilla blend."

"Drip tray," I tell the tablet, typing it. "Non-combustible."

She lets it go, which somehow makes it worse, and I retreat to the retail wall to document her product displays, because shelving is safe. Shelving has never grinned at anybody.

The autumn collection is stacked in neat amber rows, and I'm noting shelf anchorage — earthquake risk is negligible here but I'm being thorough, thoroughness is the last functioning system I have — when I start actually reading the labels.

Flannel & Firelight. Fine. First Frost. Fine. Orchard Bonfire, the one currently living rent-free in my sinuses. And then, at eye level, front and center, best-seller placement:

MOUNTAIN MAN MUSK.