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“I’ve got two minutes before Margaret sends me somewhere else.” He looked at the wiring with genuine interest. “Can I hold something?”

Shane handed him the voltage tester without comment.

Jake held it. “She’s really something,” he said.

Shane looked up.

“Allison,” Jake said, nodding toward the gazebo. “Like... she just has this way of making everyone feel like what they’re doing matters. You know? Even the stuff that’s just moving boxes.” He shook his head slightly, the admiration of a twenty-seven-year-old who found straightforward things genuinely wonderful. “She made Paulette Marsh feel like she was essential to the whole operation just by the way she asked for her help.”

Shane looked back at the wiring.

“Mm,” he said.

“She’s going to be good for this town,” Jake said.

“Hand me the connector,” Shane said.

Jake handed it over. He stayed for another minute, because Jake was constitutionally incapable of not staying for another minute, and then Margaret’s voice came from the direction of the gazebo with a quality that meant she needed someone tall, and Jake went.

Shane connected the wiring.

He did not think about what Jake had said.

He thought about it for the next forty-five minutes.

* * *

At eleven thirty, while he was reinforcing the east row booth frames (they’d been stored in the equipment shed all year and one of them had developed a lean that needed addressing before anything went in it) he heard Allison laugh.

It was a full laugh. The kind that didn’t hold anything back. It came from somewhere behind the center row of booths and he couldn’t see her from where he was, which was fine, which was entirely fine because he wasn’t looking.

He heard it again ten seconds later.

Jake Morrison came around the corner of the center booth row a moment after that, looking pleased with himself in the uncomplicated way of someone who didn’t overthink what pleased him.

Shane drove a fastener into the booth frame.

He did not count the laughs.

There had been two of them.

He drove another fastener.

* * *

The booth structure in the south corner went wrong at one fifteen.

He’d been watching it since morning, the frame was older than the others, had been repaired twice in previous years, and had developed a lean over the summer that he’d flagged to the committee in August and which had not been addressed, because things he flagged to the committee were addressed at the pace things were always addressed, which was eventually. He’d planned to reinforce it before anything went in it. He’d been working his way there.

He was coming around the east row with a support bracket when he saw it go.

Not all at once, not a collapse, just the beginning of one, the south corner dropping two inches in the way that meant the next two inches were coming fast. And Allison was standing six feet from it, her back to it, talking to Margaret about something, holding a bundle of the orange ribbon she’d been working with all morning.

He was across the square in the time it took the corner to drop another inch.

He got both hands on the frame and caught it.

The structure shuddered. He held it. The weight of it settled against his palms and he adjusted his stance and pushed back, slow and controlled, feeling for the point where it stabilized. It took about four seconds. It felt longer.