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"Five."

She stops.

I didn't mean to say it like that. I got the update from the county fire marshal's office this morning — a courtesy copy, because I asked to be looped in, because four had a shape and I wanted to be wrong. Half an acre off the Pruett Road trailhead, contained by ten a.m. Number five.

And before I can find a professional sentence to put around it, my phone does the thing it does. Three ascending tones, loud, twice. Channel 1031 — EPG's emergency push. Every head in a fifty-foot radius would turn, if the radius contained anyone but Sloane and a large white cat who followed us out here to supervise.

"I have to take this," I say, already turning away.

It's Reyes, patched through dispatch, and it's not about Woodbridge Falls — it's a consult on the marina report, ten minutes of valve specifications while I stand at the edge of Sloane's field, watching the wind move through the grass she wants to put fire pits in, doing the math I don't like. When I turn around, she's sitting on the tailgate of my truck.

On the tailgate. Of my truck. Feet swinging. Like she's been there for years, like there was never a version of the world where she wouldn't be.

"So," she says. "Fifth fire."

"You weren't supposed to hear that yet."

"And you knew about it before the coffee shop did, which means the marshal's office is copying you, which is not a thing they do for insurance paperwork." She tilts her head. "Wes always says you're 'the best we have,' and I assumed he meant, like, best at clipboards. What is it you actually do at EPG, Brady?"

And here's the moment I understand two things at once, standing in the late-morning light with my phone still warm in my hand.

The first is that Wes never told her. All these years, she's had me filed under paperwork. She doesn't know about the warehouse in Paterson, or the eleven months on the Line Creek serial case, or why I flinch at cedar-shake roofs, or what it means that I asked to be looped in up here. She doesn't know that when I look at her launch, I don't see a party. I see everything I've spent fifteen years walking through the ashes of.

The second thing I understand is that I'm going to tell her.

All of it. Which I never do.

This is exactly how it starts — the thing I promised Wes's friendship I'd never let start. Not with touching her. With telling her things.

"You might want to sit down," I say.

"I am sitting down. It's your tailgate. It's very sturdy. Great job buying it."

"I investigate arson," I say.

Her feet stop swinging.

Chapter 4

Sloane

Arson.

The word just sits there on the tailgate between us, and I run it against ten years of data and watch everything recompute.

"You investigate arson," I repeat. "Like — fires that someone⁠—"

"Set. Yes." He leans against the truck bed, close enough that I have to tilt my chin to study him, far enough that it's clearly on purpose. "Structure fires, mostly. I work origin and cause. When it's incendiary — deliberate — I work the case with investigators, insurers, sometimes law enforcement. EPG contracts me out. That's most of what I do. The clipboard stuff—" he almost smiles; I'm learning to see the almost, it happens in the eyes and dies before the mouth, like a wave that never reaches shore, "—is the vacation."

"This is your vacation. Citing my bunting."

"Best week I've had in years."

And that's a joke. Brady Callahan made a joke, deadpan, without warning, at eleven a.m. on a Saturday, and I'm so unprepared for it that I laugh the ugly laugh, the seal-bark one, and something in his face un-tightens by a single millimeter and I feel like I've won a prize at a fair.

Then he tells me about it. Not all of it — I can feel the edited-for-content of it, the file names he swaps out for "a case a few years back" — but enough. A warehouse in Paterson where the owner torched his own inventory with two employees still inside doing overtime he forgot about. Eleven months chasing someone who set fires along a creek line, getting bolder each time, until "bolder" meant a house with a family in it. He talks about fire the way I'd talk about a business partner who embezzled from me — with the intimacy of betrayal. He knows it. He respects it. He has watched it take things from people, over and over, people who all thought their setup was fine, their cords were fine, their launch event was fine.

"So when you look at my field," I say slowly, "you're not seeing my launch at all. You're seeing your greatest hits."