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I did that. Me. I cracked the propane starter slowly the way the tree man told me to, held it to the kindling low and patient, and now there’s a proper little blaze licking up around the iron ring, and forty gallons of cider are starting to think about getting warm.

The wood is his wood. Gray-barked pine, split to length, dry at the cut ends. It burns clean and hot and it smells like the whole point of autumn. I refuse to examine why lighting a fire with a quiet man’s firewood is doing something to me at high noon on a Wednesday.

I feed it another split. I stir the cider. I am a woman running a business, thank you, not a woman thinking about copper in a beard.

The diesel gives me away before I’ve turned around.

His truck rolls to my curb, and it’s just the truck. No chipper. No crew. No Deacon in the passenger seat waiting to save one of us. Wade climbs out alone—in the clean shirt from yesterday or one exactly like it—and he doesn’t have a reason to be here. We both know it.

“Crew’s at the Hendricks place,” he says, which is not a reason. “Pulling a hazard spruce off their roofline.”

“And you’re here.”

“Wanted to check the propane fitting seated right.” He crouches at my starter rig, thumbs the connection, finds it fine, because I did it fine. He stays crouched. “Seated right.”

“You drove back across town to tell me I connected a hose correctly.”

“Fittings fail.” He looks at the fire instead of me. “Forty gallons over open flame. Somebody should check.”

“Wade.” I crouch down across the fire from him, close enough that the heat shivers the air between us. “You already checked it. It’s fine. So either admit you came back for no reason, or come up with a better lie, because that one’s insulting to both of us.”

His jaw works. He looks at the fire. He looks at the kettle. He looks, finally, at me, and there’s something behind it he’s deciding whether to spend.

“No reason,” he says.

Two words, but they’re hard for him. I feel the win of them go warm all through me.

“There,” I say, gentler than I mean to. “See how the world didn’t end?”

He almost smiles. He picks up a split instead, feeds my fire without being asked, adjusts a log so the flame draws better, and I watch a man who won’t give me a full sentence give me a perfect fire. I think, not for the first time, that I have this person exactly backwards from how everyone else reads him.

“Can I ask you something?” I finally say. “And you’re allowed to give me your standard four words, but I’d take more.”

“Ask.”

“Why so quiet?” I keep my eyes on the cider so he doesn’t have to be looked at while he decides. “And don’t say ‘not much to tell,’ because I’ve watched you run a whole crew off your eyebrows and build me a floor out of my own nightmare tree. There’s plenty to tell. You just won’t.”

He’s quiet long enough that I think that’s the answer. Then he sets another split on the fire.

“My dad could talk,” he says. “Talking was the best thing he did. He’d stand in the kitchen and build you a whole future out of it. The boat. The trip. The man he’d be by Monday.” He turns a log. “Monday never came. Not once. And it cost him nothing to say it, because saying’s free.” He wipes his palm on his jeans. “Figured out young that words are the cheapest thing a person owns. So I quit trading in them. You want to know what I’ll do, watch what I do.”

It’s the most he’s said to me in three days and he says it to the fire, and I sit very still so I don’t scare it back into him.

“That’s why the wood,” I say. “And the floor. And the shim.”

“Those are true.” He shrugs one shoulder. “Anybody can say true. Fewer people do it.”

Something in me tips over. I’ve been handed a lot of words in my life by people who meant none of them, and here’s one who hoards his like they’re rationed.

“I have the opposite problem,” I hear myself say.

He looks up.

“I love things out loud.” I stir cider I don’t need to stir. “Too loud, apparently. My whole life, it’s been the same note—tone it down, Nikki, you’re a lot, Nikki, it’s sweet but be realistic, Nikki. My mom texted me that at seven this morning. On my opening week. She called my whole business sweet, like it’s a phase I’ll grow out of.” The fire pops. “So I got louder. I decided if I was going to be too much, I’d be so much that nobody could label me and forget I was standing there. And it works, mostly. Except the people worth being seen by tend to be the ones backing away.”

I don’t know why I’ve told him that. I don’t tell people that. I dress things up in a joke and keep moving.

But he’s holding still, watching me now instead of the fire, and he doesn’t back away, and he doesn’t tell me to tone it down. He does the opposite of everyone who’s ever heard me get loud. He leans in.