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“And the things we can’t control?”

“Are going to do whatever they do regardless of how many times you touch that junction box.”

She was right, and I put my hand in my pocket anyway.

“Gates at ten,” she said. “That’s two and a half hours. Try to spend some of it not visibly panicking.”

“I don’t panic. I assess risk.”

“Your risk assessment looks remarkably like panic from the outside.” She took my free hand. “Come on. Pearl’s got the second bake out and I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

We crossed back to Sweet Provisions. Up and down Main Street, the storefronts I had spent seven weeks learning wore the same garland and wreaths Holly Creek had used for decades. Now they hung straight from brackets I’d reset, lit by circuits Lena Ortiz had replaced at two in the morning while Frank and I handed her parts.

If anybody looked closely they’d see it. Old and new holding each other up, each one making the other one work.

If nobody looked closely they’d see a beautiful Main Street ready for Christmas.

Either interpretation would satisfy me.

The bakery was full of volunteers collecting provisions for stations they had invented themselves. Pearl spotted us and pointed at the corner she’d cleared. “You both look terrible,” she said. “In the haven’t-slept way, not the everything-is-ending way. That’s an improvement on Tuesday.”

“Everything might still end.”

“Everything might always end. Eat the pastry.” She pushed a plate across and went back to her ovens, which is Pearl’s answer to everything.

Nora ate standing up, reading her phone. “Owen called. The foundation’s sending somebody up to observe. They want to see it running before they decide.”

“No pressure.”

“All the pressure,” she said, and smiled at me over the cup. My ability to assess risk did not improve.

The gates opened at ten.

By quarter past I knew.

They came off the county road in a line I could see from the stage steps, and they kept coming. By eleven, the fire marshal had walked the square once and left without a word. From him, that was a rave. Children stood under the vintage displays pointing at things that were a hundred percent original above the socket and a hundred percent new below it. Parents photographed storefronts that looked as they remembered and were, invisibly, no longer a fire risk.

By noon there was a line at the cocoa cart forty deep. Nora touched my sleeve and nodded toward the boy at the front. “That’s the boy who came into my shop with three dollars. He bought two tin ornaments and made me wrap them separately so they wouldn’t look cheap.”

He had six dollars today. He was buying cocoa for three people and doing the arithmetic out loud, twice, to be sure.

“Four dollars,” Dale Henderson told him.

“The sign says six.”

“The sign doesn’t know you’re buying for three people,” Dale said.

The boy thought about that longer than most adults would have. Then he paid the four and carried three cups away in a triangle against his chest with his tongue between his teeth and did not spill any of it.

I stood there holding a clipboard I wasn’t reading.

Frank found me at the stage steps at half past twelve. “You did it.”

“We did it.”

“Maybe.” He surveyed the street as if it were a shelf he was about to reorganize. “The community effort organized around your vision.”

He considered that for a second. “No. That’s not right either. It organized around Nora asking, and you happened to be standing there with a level.” He clapped my shoulder once, hard. “Don’t let it go to your head. There’s a bracket loose on the third lamppost.”