Framed By the Mountain Man Firefighter (Copper Peak Sparks #5)

1. Levi

LEVI

The carving is in the window.

I see it from halfway down Prospect Street, propped on a black display easel between a watercolor of the ridge and a set of ceramic bowls.

It’s small enough that most people would walk past it, but I know the shape of that piece from across any distance.

I spent forty hours on it at my kitchen table with the door locked and the blinds drawn.

It’s a relief panel in beetle-kill pine, six inches by eight, the Trading Post courtyard carved from above. Every cobblestone and every timber beam, the iron hardware on the old assay office door with each bolt head no bigger than a grain of rice.

I carved the courtyard the way it looks at six in the morning when nobody’s there yet and Lea’s coffee shop light is the only thing on. The shadows fall in a certain direction at that hour, and I got them right, and nobody was ever supposed to see it.

The handwritten card next to it reads Local Artist—Inquire Within.

I stop on the sidewalk. Two tourists cut around me, and one of them says “excuse me” in a tone that means I’m blocking the entire walkway. I am, because I’m six-four and two-forty and I’ve never figured out how to take up less space than I do.

I know how the carving got here. I left it on the bench in the station common room because I liked how the light hit it there. Dean picked it up, turned it over in his hands, and asked me if I made it. I said yeah. I said it was nothing.

He mentioned it to Laurelle, and Laurelle brought it here, to the gallery in the Trading Post. Laurelle sees something beautiful, and her instinct is to put it where people can find it. She’s a good person. She wasn’t thinking about whether I’d mind or not.

And the woman who owns the gallery decided it belonged in the window without asking the man who made it.

People have been deciding what I am my whole life.

Coaches looked at me in eighth grade and decided I was a defensive end.

My father told them I didn’t want to play football, and the head coach laughed and said what else is a kid that size going to do.

Guys in bars decide I want to fight. I’ve been sucker-punched twice by men who couldn’t stand that I didn’t react when they bumped my shoulder.

Women decide I’m either dangerous or a project.

The ones who want the danger lose interest when I don’t deliver it.

The ones who want the project lose interest when they realize there’s nothing to fix.

Now a stranger has decided my private thing is public art.

I push the gallery door open. A bell chimes above me, small and bright, and I have to duck my head an inch to clear the frame.

The space inside is narrow and tall—old mining-era walls with art hung at intervals, track lighting along the exposed ceiling beams. It smells clean.

Paper and wood and something faintly sharp that might be fixative.

She’s behind the counter.

She’s small with dark hair tucked behind her ears. Her hands are busy with something I can’t see from here. She looks up at me filling her doorway, and she doesn’t flinch.

That registers before anything else. I’m used to the flinch. The half-step backward—the moment where someone’s posture adjusts to the reality that I’m bigger than they expected. She doesn’t do any of it. She looks at me the way she was probably looking at my carving before she put it in the window.

Reading me.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

Her voice is steady. No customer-service brightness, no fake warmth. A real question.

“I’m here for the piece in the window,” I say. “The relief panel.”

“Are you interested in purchasing it?”

“I made it.”

Something shifts in her face. Recognition, quick and quiet. Her gaze moves from my hands to my shoulders to my face, and I feel each stop along the way like a fingertip tracing a line on bare skin.

Women usually look at me to size up the body and decide what story it tells. She’s doing something different. She’s looking at the space between what I am and what I made, and she’s interested in the gap.

“You’re Levi,” she says. “Laurelle told me about you.”

“Laurelle didn’t ask me before she brought it in.”

“No. She didn’t.”

She says it without apology. She comes around the counter and walks to the window display, and I realize how small she actually is. The top of her head would hit my collarbone. That’s a fact I didn’t need to know, and one I can’t unknow.

She picks up the carving and holds it in both hands, thumbs running over the surface, feeling the chisel marks the way a person would read braille.

I’ve never watched anyone touch something I made. Her fingertips find the place where I reworked the door hinges three times, and something low in my chest pulls tight.

“This belongs here,” she says.

“It’s mine.”

“I know it’s yours. And it belongs in a gallery.

” She turns the piece in the light, and I watch her study the shadow work on the courtyard stones.

“You carved the grain of the cobblestones to catch the light from the left. That means you were working from a morning reference. Early morning, before the courtyard fills up. Six o’clock, maybe earlier. ”

My throat tightens. She read the time of day out of the chisel angle. She looked at a piece of wood and saw when I was awake and alone and paying attention.

“That’s a deliberate choice,” she says. “You didn’t carve the Trading Post the way most people see it. You carved it the way it looks when nobody else is there.” She looks up at me. “That’s worth showing.”

I don’t know what to do with this. I came in here to take the carving and leave. The speech I had was simple. It’s mine, I didn’t give anyone permission to display it, I’d like it back. Clean and done.

She’s holding it out to me now. Not clutching it, not pulling it away.

Offering it back with both hands, and her eyes are saying, You can take it, but you’d be wrong.

If I reach for it, my hands will close over hers.

She’s holding it palm-up, fingers spread, and there’s no way to take the carving without touching her.

“You didn’t ask me,” I say.

“I didn’t need to. The work speaks for itself.”

The work speaks for itself.

Nobody has ever called what I do work. Dean said it was cool.

Laurelle said it was beautiful. Both of those are nice things to say about a piece of wood.

But work means something different. Work is the forty hours at the kitchen table, the chisel slipping at two in the morning, the sanding and resanding because a cobblestone the size of a fingernail still has to look right or there’s no point.

She called it work, and she talked about it as though it has something to say. I’m standing in a gallery full of art with my hands at my sides and no idea what to do next.

I look at the carving in her hands. Then I look at her face.

She’s close enough that I can smell linseed oil and paper, and I notice that the way I notice everything I shouldn’t.

She’s waiting, patient and certain, and there’s nothing in her expression that’s trying to manage me.

She’s not being careful with my size or my silence.

She’s just standing there, holding the thing I made, and telling me what she sees.

I should take it. I should say thank you and walk out and put the carving in my truck and bring it back to the station bench where it was mine and only mine.

“I have to go,” I say.

I leave without the carving. The bell chimes behind me, and the afternoon hits me all at once. Prospect Street, tourists, the sound of someone’s dog barking near the coffee shop. I walk to my truck and sit in the cab with the engine off.

She’s wrong. The carving is just something I do with my hands when the house is quiet. It’s not work. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t say anything about who I am or when I’m awake or what I see when nobody’s watching.

I start the engine.

I mean to go back for it. Tomorrow. First thing. I’ll walk in, take the piece off the easel, and that will be the end of it.

I drive home, and I don’t go back. The carving stays in the window, and somewhere between Prospect Street and my kitchen table, I stop pretending I don’t know why.

She looked at me and didn’t flinch. She looked at the carving and saw the man who made it.

Nobody ever sees the man who made it.