3. Leah
LEAH
Igot to the station ten minutes early, which for me counted as a miracle, and stood outside the bay doors long enough to talk myself out of turning around twice.
The building itself was squat and brick, more practical than pretty, with an American flag snapping hard in the wind above the doors and a hand painted sign near the entrance that read VISITORS PLEASE CHECK IN.
I checked in. A woman at the front desk barely looked up before waving me toward the back, like people showing up with rolling laptop bags and nervous energy were a fairly regular occurrence around here.
I brought printouts, actual color coded printouts in a folder, because I learned a long time ago that no client remembers what you tell them, only what you hand them.
What I had not planned for was walking into a fire station break room and finding a laminated three ring binder already waiting on the table, spine out, NATIONAL FIRE PROTECTION ASSOCIATION stamped across the cover in red block letters.
It looked less like a reference manual and more like a weapon somebody had decided to holster politely until I sat down.
The break room smelled like burnt coffee and pine cleaner, the kind of clash that only happens in buildings run by people too busy to notice either.
A whiteboard on the far wall still carried last week's shift assignments in smudged blue marker.
A refrigerator hummed in the corner with a sign taped to the door that read LABEL YOUR FOOD OR IT BECOMES COMMUNITY PROPERTY, and underneath it somebody had drawn a surprisingly detailed sandwich.
Derek sat across the table already, sleeves pushed up, looking like a man bracing for a dentist appointment he'd scheduled himself.
A dog the size of a small bear lay under the table with his chin resting on Derek's boot, one eyebrow twitching up when I pulled out a chair, like he was deciding whether I merited a full greeting. He decided I did not, yet, and went back to watching the door.
"That's Ember," Derek said, not looking up from the binder. "He judges everyone who walks through that door. Don't take it personally."
"Too late." I set my laptop down and turned the screen toward him. "I already feel very seen."
I'd built the deck the way I built every pitch, top heavy with the dream first and the logistics buried until somebody asked, because nobody falls in love with a spreadsheet.
My hands were not quite steady on the trackpad, though I would have denied that under oath.
I clicked through slowly. A forty foot bonfire anchored the town square, ringed with hay bales for seating.
Lantern strings threaded through every tree along Main Street, the kind that would turn the whole block gold after dark.
A horse drawn sleigh looped a route from the square to the church lawn and back, bells on the harness, breath steaming in the cold.
I had mocked up the images myself the night before, stealing a font off a bakery website and dropping in stock photos of snow until the whole thing looked expensive even though it had cost me nothing but sleep.
"Winter Wonderland Night Market," I said, and let the slide sit a second before I kept talking, because good pitches know when to shut up. "Vendors down both sides of Main. Hot cider, roasted chestnuts, the works. This is the kind of thing people drive two hours to see."
Derek studied the screen the way he'd studied my license the first night we met, unhurried, cataloging every detail before he let himself react to any of it.
"Walk me through the bonfire," he said.
"Forty feet across, center of the square, ringed with hay bales."
"Forty feet." He said it flat, like I'd told him I planned to source the hay bales from the moon. "A fire that size needs a minimum setback of fifty feet from any structure. Your square is what, sixty feet corner to corner?"
"Sixty two."
"So your bonfire eats the entire square and leaves nothing for the vendors you just told me were lining both sides of Main."
I opened my mouth to argue the math and shut it again, because the math argued for him. "Fine. The lanterns, then. Those are just string lights."
"Strung how high?"
"Fifteen feet, tree to tree."
"Through the fire lane." He tapped the binder without opening it, like he'd already memorized the page. "That's your primary egress route if anything happens on Main during peak crowd hours. Nothing crosses it below eighteen feet, and even then I want it removable in under two minutes."
"You want my Christmas lights to have an exit strategy."
"I want everyone standing under them to have one."
That landed harder than I wanted it to, and I let it sit a second before I moved on. "The sleigh route, at least, is harmless. It's a horse. It's basically a golf cart with better marketing."
"The sleigh route runs directly past where your vendors want propane heaters." Derek finally looked up. "Open flame or radiant heat near a live animal that spooks at loud noise, in a crowd, on ice. If that horse bolts, it doesn't stop at the sidewalk."
Someone laughed in the doorway, low and delighted, and I turned to find a man I half recognized from the town hall meeting leaning against the frame with a mug in each hand, clearly enjoying every second of my dismantling.
He had the build of someone who spent his off hours lifting things that did not need lifting, and an expression that said he'd been waiting all morning for exactly this kind of entertainment to wander in off the street.
"Don't mind me," he said, setting one mug down in front of Derek without being asked. "I just like watching him do this. Better than television."
"Sarge," Derek said, without turning around, in a tone that suggested this was not new information for either of them.
"Just delivering coffee." Sarge leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, grinning at me like we were already in on the same joke. "Please, continue. He gets more articulate the more things there are to reject."
"I've noticed." I closed the laptop halfway, more for effect than anything else. "Is there anything on my list he's going to approve?"
"Statistically? No." Sarge looked far too pleased about this. "But watching you try is the best thing that's happened in this building since the moose."
I decided right then that I liked Sarge, and that Derek probably knew exactly what he was doing, needling me on purpose to see if I'd fold. I didn't fold. I opened the laptop the rest of the way and started talking faster.
"Fine. New pitch. The bonfire shrinks to something inside your fifty foot setback, and we ring it with actual fire pits instead of one giant pyre, spaced enough that no single point of failure takes out the whole display.
" I didn't wait for him to respond. "The lanterns move off the fire lane entirely and run along the storefront awnings instead, which gives you the same gold tunnel effect down Main without touching your exit route.
" I got to the third point before he could interrupt.
"The sleigh gets rerouted around the heater zone instead of through it, which actually makes for a better photo anyway, since right now the path you had it on ran past the dumpsters. "
Derek didn't say anything for a second. He looked at the binder, then at me, like he was recalculating something he'd already decided the answer to.
"That's better," he said finally, in the tone of a man admitting a fact he'd rather not.
"I know." I didn't bother hiding how pleased that made me. "You can say I did good work. It won't kill you."
"I said it was better. That's different from good."
"You people really do have a whole vocabulary for not complimenting someone."
He almost smiled at that, the same ghost of one I'd seen the night we met, gone before it fully arrived. "The bonfire's still too big, even scaled down and ringed. I'm not approving open flame in the town square at that size. Full stop."
"It's the centerpiece, Derek. You can't have Winter Wonderland with a sad little campfire nobody can see from more than ten feet away."
"I can have Winter Wonderland with zero burn injuries. That's the version I'm approving."
"A forty foot bonfire in a town square is not ambiance." He said it like he was reading it off a report that hadn't been written yet. "It's an incident report waiting to happen."
"Wow." I sat back, mostly for effect, partly because I needed a second to regroup. "For a fire department, you people are shockingly anti fire."
"We're pro controlled fire." He didn't even blink. "There's a whole vocabulary you're skipping."
"There it is again. The vocabulary."
"It's a good vocabulary."
I could have kept arguing the size of the bonfire until the coffee went cold, and some stubborn part of me wanted to, just to see how long it took before he cracked and gave me an inch.
But I was tired, and he clearly wasn't moving, and there was a version of this where I came back with numbers instead of feelings and won that way instead.
"Fine," I said, closing the laptop for real this time. "You'll get a revised plan. Something scaled to whatever paranoid little number your code allows, and you're going to look at it and realize it's still better than anything this town has done in years."
"I look forward to being underwhelmed within safety parameters."
"That should be your department's motto."
Sarge, still lingering in the doorway with his own mug, laughed outright at that, and Derek shot him a look that promised a conversation later.
I gathered my things slower than I needed to, mostly to give myself a second to take him in properly while he wasn't looking.
He'd sized up my license and my dented trailer that first night the same way, like every corner of this town was his to catalog.
There was something almost restful about a man who never overstated anything, who would rather lose an argument than exaggerate his way to winning it.
I was not used to that. Trevor could talk himself out of any hole he'd dug, smooth and quick and always a little bit lying.
It had taken me two years to learn what that smoothness actually sounded like.
Derek didn't have it in him. He argued like every sentence had to survive an audit before he'd let it out of his mouth.
Infuriating. He was also, unfairly, a little bit attractive in a way I resented on principle.
I hated having that thought. I hated it more for being right.
Ember lifted his head as I stood, tail thumping once against the floor, and he earned points back for that, as far as I was concerned, even if his owner hadn't.
"Bye, Ember. You're the nicer one." I looked at Derek. "Barely."
I paused at the door anyway, because I'd learned a long time ago that the last word mattered more than the argument itself, and because some petty gleeful part of me couldn't resist.
"For the record, Chief," I said, "it's a fire department. I'd think you people would be pro bonfire."
I didn't wait to watch his face do whatever it was about to do.
I was already through the door and into the cold, boots crunching over salted concrete, before he could get a word out.
I'd already figured out something about Derek Walsh in under an hour of knowing him.
Leaving him with the last word rattled him more than winning ever would, and I intended to keep doing it for as long as this job made it possible.
It was a small thing to hang a whole afternoon on, but it was mine, and I meant to enjoy it.