5. Leah
LEAH
The town square looked like a crime scene by the time we got the folding chairs out of storage, towers of them stacked eight and ten high across the grass.
I had to figure out where two hundred people would sit without tripping over a fire lane Derek had already paced out twice, tape measure clenched in his teeth like a man on a mission.
The air smelled like cut grass gone brittle with frost, and somewhere behind the gazebo a committee volunteer I hadn't met yet was arguing quietly with a folding table about which of its legs actually wanted to lock into place.
Midmorning light came in low and gold across the whole square, catching every breath either of us exhaled in little clouds that hung there a second before dissolving.
Somewhere off toward the church a snowplow scraped along a side street, the sound carrying farther than it should have in the cold, thin air.
I had my clipboard, my measuring twine, and a growing conviction that Derek approached a public gathering space the same way he'd approached the dent in his tailgate that first night: methodical and mildly aggrieved.
I had my own measurements to take. Vendor booths needed ten feet of clearance on the walking path, more near the food trucks, and the lighting run down the east side of the square had to avoid the low branches on the maples without looking like an afterthought once it was up.
I paced it out with a spool of twine and a can of marking paint, calling out numbers to myself the same way Derek called out his, except mine sounded like a woman planning a party and his sounded like a man defusing something.
"Twenty two feet," he said, mostly to himself, crouched by the gazebo with the tape measure stretched taut. "That's cutting it close."
"Cutting what close?"
"Setback." He didn't look up. "You want the vendor row here, you lose four feet of buffer on the north side."
"So I move the vendor row."
"So you move the vendor row."
"You could just say I'm right."
"I could." He didn't look up from the notebook. "I'm choosing not to, on principle."
"What principle is that?"
"The one where I don't make a habit of telling event planners they're right. It goes to their heads."
"That's not a real principle. That's a personality flaw with a lanyard."
The corner of his mouth did the thing again, that almost smile that never quite finished arriving, and I counted it as a small personal victory even though he'd never admit I'd won anything.
I watched him write the number down in a small notebook that looked like it had survived several winters, and thought again that the man seemed to measure joy as carefully as he measured everything else.
"In my professional opinion," I said, "that dog is a liability."
Ember, currently attached to a leash looped twice around Derek's wrist, sat at his feet with the particular stillness of an animal biding his time.
"In my professional opinion," Derek said, "so are you, and I still have to work with you for two months."
"Rude. Accurate. Rude."
Derek crouched to mark something on the gazebo step, and the leash slipped off his wrist the way ninety pounds of enthusiasm will eventually slip off anything. Ember was gone before either of us finished processing it.
He hit the first tower of folding chairs at a dead run, the kind of run that had no plan beyond forward, and the whole structure went over sideways with a crash that sent two crows off the church roof and a committee volunteer diving behind the gazebo like incoming fire.
Ember, thrilled, treated the collapse as an invitation and launched himself directly into the wreckage, scattering the second tower before I'd even finished flinching from the first, chairs bouncing and clattering across the grass in every direction while he chased the loudest one like it had personally wronged him.
"Ember!"
He did not stop. He circled the gazebo once at a dead sprint, knocked over a bucket of marking flags, and skidded into a third tower that folded like dominoes, chairs slapping the ground in a chain reaction that ended with one bouncing to a stop directly against my shin.
I turned to see how badly Derek was taking this, bracing for the flat, furious voice I'd already learned to expect when something threatened his careful margins, and instead found him standing frozen at the gazebo steps with both hands pressed to his mouth, shoulders shaking, a sound coming out of him that took me a full second to identify because I had genuinely never heard it before.
He was laughing, really laughing, the kind that bent him at the waist and turned his face into something ten years younger, helpless and startled by itself, like he hadn't given it permission and it had shown up anyway.
I stood there in the middle of eleven collapsed folding chairs and forgot, for one full second, to be annoyed about any of it.
Ember, apparently satisfied with the destruction, abandoned the wreckage and trotted straight to me instead, sides heaving, and leaned his entire weight into my legs with the confidence of an animal who had already decided this outcome days ago and was only now getting around to informing me.
"Traitor," Derek said, still fighting the laugh, wiping one eye with the back of his wrist.
"He has excellent taste."
"He has zero taste. He just ate a marking flag."
I looked down. Ember, tail going, had indeed eaten a marking flag, orange fabric hanging out one side of his mouth like a very poor magic trick.
I laughed before I could stop myself, a real one, loud enough that the committee volunteer poked her head back out from behind the gazebo to see what she'd missed.
We spent the next twenty minutes restacking chairs while Ember supervised from a safe distance, thoroughly unrepentant, offering the occasional tail thump whenever either of us glanced his way, as if encouragement counted as labor.
The committee volunteer reappeared long enough to confirm the folding table had been defeated for good and to inform us, with real solemnity, that she'd witnessed the entire spectacle and intended to describe it to everyone she knew by supper.
Derek accepted this the way he accepted most things he couldn't control, with a short nod and the air of a man recalculating how much of his dignity he had left to work with.
By the time we finished, the sun had climbed high enough to turn the frost on the grass into something closer to dew.
"I'll walk you to your car," Derek said. It wasn't phrased as a question, and I decided not to argue with it, mostly because my hands were cold and his jacket looked significantly warmer than mine.
We cut across the square and down the path that ran behind it, the one that eventually met the gravel road out past the ranger station, Ember trotting ahead of us with the marking flag still clamped triumphantly in his jaw like a trophy nobody else wanted.
Neither of us said much. It was the kind of quiet that didn't need filling, the two of us walking at the same unhurried pace with our hands shoved in our pockets against the cold, and I found myself matching my steps to his without deciding to, the way you fall into rhythm with someone before you've admitted you're paying that much attention.
Derek slowed without seeming to notice, the way your feet know a familiar turn before your head catches up. I slowed with him without deciding to, following half a step behind as the path curved past a small stone bench half in shadow at the edge of the trees.
He stopped in front of it, not for long, just long enough that I had time to read the words carved across the top, simple and worn soft at the edges, the kind of sentence written for people who already know what it means and don't need it explained.
Beneath it, low near the base, a small brass plate caught what little sun made it through the pines, half frosted over, a date etched into the metal that I could almost, not quite, make out from where I stood behind his shoulder.
I didn't ask.
Something told me this wasn't mine to push.
If I was patient, he'd let me in eventually, on his own time.
So I stood there instead, quiet, close enough that my shoulder nearly brushed his arm, and let him have whatever thirty seconds of stillness he needed before he turned and kept walking like nothing had happened at all.
"Sorry," he said, once we were moving again. "Habit."
"You don't owe me an explanation."
"I know."
That was all either of us said about it, and somehow that felt like exactly the right amount.
We walked the rest of the way to my car in the same easy quiet as before, except it wasn't quite the same, not anymore.
Something had shifted in the space between us, small and unspoken, the kind of shift you only notice because you're the sort of person who notices everything, which I was starting to suspect I might be when it came to him specifically.
Back in my car, Ember's flag still lost somewhere in the wreckage of the square, I realized I'd memorized the shape of that date without meaning to, the particular slant of the numbers, the way frost had blurred the last digit into something I could guess at but not confirm.
I hadn't asked. I hadn't needed to. Some part of me had filed it away anyway, careful as evidence, the way you keep something you're not ready to use yet but aren't willing to lose either.
I drove past the turnoff for my own street twice, circling the block without fully meaning to, replaying the way his face had looked standing in front of that bench, quiet and unguarded in a way I hadn't seen from him before, not even in the middle of laughing so hard he'd had to cover his own mouth.
That version of him felt like something private I'd been allowed to witness by accident, and I wasn't sure yet what I was supposed to do with it.
Wanting to know his story badly enough to memorize a half frozen date on a bench he hadn't meant for me to see scared me more than I wanted to admit.
That wasn't casual, and it wasn't professional curiosity either.
I drove the whole way home turning it over, unable to let it go.
In Denver I'd spent two years with a man whose whole personality I could have recited from memory within a month of meeting him, and it had taken me considerably longer than that to notice there wasn't anything underneath it worth digging for.
Derek was the opposite problem entirely, careful and closed off in a way that only made me want to know what he was protecting, and why.
By the time I finally pulled into my own driveway, parked crooked, engine still ticking as it cooled in the dark, I caught myself hoping, for the first time since Denver, that someone's secrets might actually be worth staying around long enough to learn.
I sat there a minute before going inside, radio off, just the tick of the cooling engine and my own breath fogging the windshield.
It should have felt like an ordinary end to an ordinary morning, chairs restacked, measurements taken, one more item crossed off a very long list. Instead I found myself replaying the sound of his laugh, unguarded and a little too loud for a man who usually measured everything he let out.
I hadn't expected to like that sound as much as I did.
I wasn't sure what to do with liking it either.