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“We’ll have the spar down tomorrow,” I tell her, because it’s true, and because it’s the only promise that I know I’ll keep. “Early. You’ll want the pumpkins clear again by nine.”

“Nine.” She’s already walking backward toward her counter, watching me, grinning. “I’m getting a rhythm with you, Barlow. It’s all trees and warnings and then, when I least expect it, six words of pure poetry.”

“Nine words.”

She laughs again, and I climb into the truck before it can do anything else to me.

Deacon waits until we’re rolling to say it. “You know you smiled.”

“I didn’t.”

“With your whole face. For about a second. I got worried.”

I watch Punkin’s shrink in the side mirror—white canvas, a stack of orange, a woman in an apron already talking to the next person who’ll stop. Two days. Then a dawn drive to the regional—the thing I’ve pointed my whole fall at. The thing that’s supposed to matter.

“Drive,” I tell him.

He drives. I sit with the fact that I have two days, a stump to pull, and no earthly idea how to say out loud the kind of true thing she hands out a hundred times a morning.

I’ll figure it out with the work. I always do.

3

NIKKI

By six, the strip’s gone quiet and gold, and I’m alone with my canopy and a to-do list I’ve mostly beaten.

The crew packed out an hour ago. Chipper hitched, gravel raked smooth, the dead pine down to a knee-high stump they’ll grind out tomorrow. Deacon waved. Rye told me to save him a cider Thursday. Wade lifted two fingers off the truck door, and that was my goodbye. Two fingers, from a man who rations words down to the syllable. It tracks.

I chalk the last line onto my menu board—MULLED CIDER, $4, WEEP OPTIONAL—and step back to admire a stand that is almost, almost ready. Canopy square. Pumpkins stacked. Lights strung and waiting on dark. All I need now is to get my kettle going tomorrow and pray the propane backup behaves, because an open wood fire under forty gallons of cider is either the coziest thing on Prospect Street or a very big lawsuit.

That’s when I see the wood.

It’s stacked at the back corner of my counter, out of the walkway, tucked where the canopy meets the kettle rig. Split rounds, forearm-length, gray-barked pine gone pale at the cut ends. A dozen of them, maybe more, laid up in a tidy little cross-hatch so they’ll dry and won’t roll.

I didn’t buy that wood. I didn’t stack that wood. Nobody put that wood there but the man who took down the tree it came from.

I set my hand flat on the top round. The cut’s still raw, sap-sticky, cool. My throat does something before the rest of me catches up.

He bucked me firewood. Out of the pine that’s been threatening my livelihood since June, the one I couldn’t afford to have removed until the district contract covered it—he took the good wood off it and split it down to kettle size and stacked it where I’d find it. Then he drove away lifting two fingers without saying one word.

Who does that? Who does a thing that kind, then hands you a peace sign?

The diesel comes back up the strip before I’ve fully processed what I’ve seen.

I know the engine now. I hate that I know the engine now. The mud-colored truck rolls to the curb, and Wade climbs out in a clean shirt, hair still wet at the edges. That means he went home, showered, and came back. I refuse to let my heart do anything about that.

“Forgot my wedges,” he says.

He walks past me to the stump, crouches, comes up with a canvas roll of steel from the gravel. Then he stands there. He doesn’t leave.

“You left me a stack of wood,” I say.

“Was going to chip it.” He looks at the little cross-hatch, not at me. “No sense chipping good pine. It’ll burn hot for that kettle. Dry it another week, it’s better.”

“You bucked it, split it, and stacked it so it wouldn’t roll. On your lunch. For a stranger.”

“Took ten minutes.”