Page 8

I stop writing.

The label has a little illustration on it. A silhouette of a bearded man in a plaid shirt, standing in front of a pine tree, arms crossed. The tasting notes — candles have tasting notes now — read: cedar, leather, woodsmoke, and a hint of stubborn.

"That's our number one seller," Sloane says from the register, where she is absolutely not doing whatever paperwork she picked up thirty seconds ago. "Tourists buy three at a time. There's a waiting list."

"Mm."

"I developed it two years ago. I needed a masculine scent for the fall line, so I asked myself, what does the most impossible man I know smell like—" she pauses, delicately, "—hypothetically."

I look at the bearded silhouette. The silhouette looks back at me with open hostility.

"The beard's wrong," I say, and put a checkmark next to her shelf anchorage.

"I'm sorry?"

"Nothing. Shelving passes."

"No, no, no." She abandons the register entirely. "You looked at my label art and said the beard is wrong, which implies a reference beard, which implies⁠—"

"Your aisle spacing is thirty-nine inches. Code wants forty-four for this occupancy."

"—which implies that Brady Callahan just suggested a candle is about him, which is a fascinating theory, because when I tell people who it's about, I say a rugged composite. I say Paul Bunyan energy. I have never once said⁠—"

"The aisle, Sloane."

"The shelf can move five inches, and you're deflecting." She plants herself in the thirty-nine-inch aisle in question, directly in my documentation zone, arms crossed in an unconscious — or worse, conscious — imitation of the silhouette. "Would you like to smell it? For the assessment? Strictly professional. I'd hate for your report to be incomplete."

"The report doesn't require⁠—"

She's already got the tester open under my nose. Cedar, leather, woodsmoke. A hint of stubborn. It's a good blend. It's a very good blend, is the infuriating thing — she's talented, she's talented at the thing she loves, and she built a business in a barn out of sheer stubbornness and good taste, and the candle smells like my truck and my jacket and my entire personality in a nine-dollar amber jar, and she's watching me over the rim of it with her eyes full of fireworks.

"Well?" she says.

"Aisle spacing," I say, to the tablet, to the shelf, to God. "Forty-four inches."

"You know what I think?" She caps the tester and sets it back with the gentleness of someone holstering a weapon. "I think you liked it."

The worst part is I'm going to buy one. Not today. Not in any way she'll ever trace. But somewhere down the line there's a version of me alone in an apartment that smells like cedar and leather and a hint of stubborn, and honestly, that man deserves what he gets.

We move on to the war I actually can't lose: the outdoor event site.

"For the record," she says, trailing me to the rear doors, "the beard comment is now canon. I'm telling Junie. By Friday the whole town will know the Mountain Man has a reference beard, and there is nothing your clipboard can do about it."

"Forty-four inches, Sloane."

"Forty-four inches of DEFLECTION," she says, delighted with herself, and holds the door.

She walks me out through the big rear doors to the field behind the barn, and I watch her whole posture change. Inside, she's a shopkeeper. Out here, she's a general again. She shows me where the six fire pits will go, the seating clusters, the string-light poles, the pour-demo station under a canopy, and she's good — she's laid it out with more clearance than most event planners would bother with, and the sight lines are smart, and for a second I can see it the way she does. Two hundred people in scarves. Sparks going up into a cold October sky. The barn glowing behind it like something off a postcard.

Point of origin, my brain supplies. Wind out of the northwest, ember transport onto a cedar-shake roof, thirty-year-old timber, one exit.

"No," I say.

Her face goes through five expressions, settles on the sixth. "What do you mean, no? You haven't even⁠—"

"Fuel moisture's been critical-low for six weeks. You're proposing open wood fires, upslope of a timber structure, with two hundred civilians and a fifteen-mile-an-hour prevailing gust, in a county that's had⁠—"

"Four fires, yes, you keep saying it⁠—"