11. Leah
LEAH
Pinewood Perk after closing looked like a different building.
Chairs were dragged out from behind the counter into a circle that had given up on being a circle around chair six, and the string lights above the pastry case were still glowing.
Maddie refused to turn them off, even for a working meeting.
The whiteboard I'd wheeled in from the back office stood empty at the center of everything, a wide rectangle of nothing waiting for me to turn six weeks of chaos into something a normal human being could actually read.
I got there early enough to claim the good marker before anyone could argue about ownership of the good marker, which in my experience with small town committees was a real and specific risk.
"You brought your own markers." Maddie appeared at my elbow with two mugs, setting one down in front of the whiteboard like an offering. "That's either very organized or deeply concerning."
"Both things can be true."
"They usually are, with you."
I was still testing markers on a scrap of receipt paper, hunting for one that wouldn't skip, when the door chimed and the committee arrived in a loose clump.
Judy Whitfield led the charge in a coat the color of a candy cane.
Doris Hutchins followed two steps behind with a travel mug she'd clearly filled at her own kitchen rather than trust Maddie's brew, and a man I hadn't met yet trailed them both, looking like he suspected this meeting was going to run long.
"Leah, this is Harold Pruitt." Judy made the introduction with the flourish of someone unveiling a prize. "He runs the outfitters on Birch, skis, snowshoes, all of it. Every year he tells me the festival budget gives him hives, and every year I make him come anyway."
"Every year I'm right about the hives." Harold shook my hand, brief and businesslike. "Nothing personal. I just like knowing where the money's going before it's gone."
"Healthy instinct." I liked him immediately, mostly because a man who worried about money before spending it was a man I could actually work with. "You're going to like this meeting. I promise numbers."
"She always has numbers," Doris said, settling into a chair with the particular authority of a woman claiming territory. "It's the only reason I keep showing up."
Derek came in last, shaking snow off his boots at the door, and something in my chest did the small, stupid thing it had started doing lately whenever he walked into a room I was already standing in.
I ignored it the same way I'd been ignoring it for weeks, which was to say not well, and not for very long.
"Chief." Harold nodded at him. "Here to tell us all our ideas are a fire code violation?"
"Statistically likely."
"Comforting."
We got everyone seated, or seated enough, chairs angled at odd distances like nobody had fully committed to the circle concept.
I stood at the whiteboard with a marker in one hand and six weeks of festival logistics in the other, and started talking before the room could decide to talk over me instead.
"Six events. One town. No overlapping setup crews, which means I need everyone's honest availability, not the availability you wish you had.
" I wrote HOLIDAY MARKET across the top of the board and underlined it twice.
"This weekend. Vendor booths, hot cider, the whole Main Street lineup we already walked.
That one's basically done. I'm not worried about that one. "
"You should worry about the popcorn machine," Doris said. "It caught fire two years running."
"Noted. Popcorn machine gets its own extinguisher and possibly its own restraining order."
"I can staff an extinguisher near any open heat source," Derek said, already reaching for his own small notebook. "Add it to the list."
"See, this is exactly the energy I need.
" I wrote TREE LIGHTING beneath the first line, and underneath that, ICE SCULPTURE CONTEST AND CAROLING WEEK, letting the board fill in real time while the room watched like it was a magic trick instead of basic scheduling.
"Tree lighting goes up the first weekend after the market.
Ice sculptures and caroling run back to back the following week, which means the rink needs to be fully operational before the sculptures show up, or we've got seven days of very sad, very melted art. "
"About the rink." Judy leaned forward, hands clasped, the exact posture she used right before proposing something that would eventually become my problem.
"I've been thinking bigger. What if we did real ice, the whole footprint, and extended the hours into the evening so people could skate under the lanterns? "
"Real ice is expensive to maintain and slower to install," Harold said, already reaching for his coffee like he needed reinforcement. "Synthetic panels go down in a day. No refrigeration unit, no water truck. Half the cost."
"Synthetic ice looks cheap, Harold. We are not a cheap town."
"We're not a rich one either, Judy."
"Real ice needs a certified thickness check every six hours.
" Derek didn't look up from his notebook.
"I can staff that. It's not complicated, it's just a commitment.
If the department signs off on the checks, real ice is safe, and it's the better experience.
I'd rather we do it right than do it cheap. "
The room went still for a second, the specific quiet that happens when somebody hands a group an actual solution instead of one more opinion to argue about.
"There." I wrote REAL ICE, CERTIFIED CHECKS, CHIEF STAFFED underneath the rink line, and didn't look at Derek while I did it, mostly because I could feel warmth creeping up the back of my neck that had nothing to do with the coffee. "See, this is called collaboration, everyone. Write that down."
"I don't need to write it down," Doris said. "I've got a memory like a bear trap."
"For gossip, sure," Maddie said. "For anything useful, questionable."
Judy moved on to Santa's cabin next, and this was where the meeting genuinely threatened to derail, because her vision put the cabin directly in the center of the square, close enough to the bonfire pit that Santa would apparently be delivering gifts within spitting distance of an open flame.
"It's festive," Judy said, when I raised the obvious problem. "Children love proximity to warmth."
"Children love proximity to marshmallows, Judy. There's a difference, and the difference is code."
"You've got wood construction," Derek said, flat and immediate, "sitting inside a fifteen foot radius of an open burn pit, in a space that's going to be packed elbow to elbow with kids in synthetic snowsuits. I'm not signing off on that placement. Not close, not this year."
"Fine. Where would you put it?"
"Near the gazebo. Same sightline, same photo opportunities, actual clearance from the fire.
" I said it before Derek could, because I'd already walked that exact stretch of ground weeks ago with a tape measure and a very patient fire chief standing over my shoulder.
"It solves the crowding problem too. Right now everyone's bottlenecked around one corner of the square.
Split the attractions and the whole layout breathes better. "
"That's twice now you two have agreed on something before I've finished a sentence," Judy said, not quite as an accusation, more like a woman filing away a piece of trivia for later.
"We just both read the same code book."
"Sure," Judy said, in nearly the exact tone Maddie used whenever she didn't believe a word coming out of my own mouth, and I decided not to examine that parallel too closely.
We worked through the middle stretch of the calendar with less drama than I'd expected.
The Christmas Eve Candlelight Walk got mapped out along Main with paper luminaries instead of open flame, a decision Derek approved without a single objection, and Christmas Day settled easily once Maddie volunteered Pinewood Perk's kitchen and half the department volunteered to cook a dinner nobody had technically asked them to make.
"We do it every year," Derek said, when I raised an eyebrow at that. "Whoever's not home with family eats together instead. Town started showing up a few years back, and nobody ever told them to stop."
Something about the plainness of that answer settled somewhere in my chest I wasn't ready to examine either, so I wrote CHRISTMAS DAY, FIREHOUSE DINNER on the board and kept moving before anyone could watch my face do something about it.
That left the finale, and I'd saved it for last on purpose, because I wanted the room warmed up and reasonable before I introduced the one item guaranteed to set Judy's imagination loose.
"New Year's Eve. Starlight Bonfire and Ball.
" I wrote it across the bottom of the board in letters twice the size of everything above it, because it deserved the emphasis.
"Dancing in the square, string lights overhead, a bonfire scaled to whatever the fire code actually allows, and a countdown at midnight.
That's the whole plan. Elegant, contained, doable. "
"What if we added fireworks?" Judy's eyes had gone bright in the specific way that meant trouble. "A real display, timed to midnight, launched from out past the ballfields."
"Absolutely not," Derek said, before I'd even opened my mouth.
"You didn't even consider it?"
"I considered it for the half second it took you to finish the sentence.
Setting off fireworks over a crowd that dense, in a town with one road out if something goes wrong, isn't a risk I'm willing to carry into a new year.
" He said it evenly, no heat in it, just the same unshakable certainty he brought to anything involving actual flame.
"The bonfire and the lights are the display. That's enough."
"He's right." I meant it, though some small competitive part of me had been quietly hoping the fireworks idea might survive just long enough for me to argue for it myself. "The scaled bonfire alone is going to look incredible against the snow. We don't need to compete with ourselves."
"That's three," Maddie said, quiet enough that only I caught it, though from the way her eyes cut across the table I had a feeling she'd meant for me to.
"Three what?"
"Three times tonight he's backed your plan over hers without even checking with you first." Maddie's grin was doing something dangerous. "That's not chief behavior, Leah. That's something else."
I didn't answer her, mostly because I didn't trust what would come out if I tried, and because across the circle Derek had already moved on to logistics for the fireworks alternative he'd just killed, entirely unaware he'd become the subject of conversation two seats away.
Judy launched into one last, smaller pitch, something modest, something practically harmless, and Derek shut that down too with the same calm, immovable patience he'd used on the cabin and the ice and the first fireworks idea.
I found myself watching him do it with an attention that had stopped being about the festival somewhere in the last twenty minutes.
"Sparklers, at least," Judy tried. "Just for the countdown."
"Sparklers in a crowd that size are four hundred small open flames I'd have to track individually. No."
"You say no to everything."
"I say no to the things that catch fire. Most things catch fire."
Maddie caught my eye across the table the second his voice went steady and sure again, and mouthed three words with theatrical precision, slow enough that I couldn't pretend to miss them.
He likes you.
He does NOT, I mouthed back, wildly unconvincing even to myself, and loud enough in the shape of my own mouth that Doris, three seats down, snorted into her cider, coughing hard enough that she had to set the mug down for good, one hand pressed flat against her chest like she'd just witnessed a small crime.
"You two are going to give me a heart condition," Doris said, once she'd recovered enough to speak. "Both of you. Separately and together."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," I said, to nobody in particular, and turned back to the whiteboard like six lines of festival scheduling were suddenly the most fascinating thing in the entire building.
Behind me, Maddie's grin widened into something smug enough to be a felony, and Derek, blessedly oblivious, kept talking about permit timelines like the whole room hadn't just watched something shift between us.
I stood there with a marker capped in one hand, staring at my own handwriting circling a calendar I'd built out of nothing, and admitted I had no idea what I was going to do about Derek Walsh.
The meeting broke up slow, the way small town meetings always seemed to, everyone lingering to refill mugs and trade half a dozen conversations that had nothing to do with the festival at all.
Harold left first, muttering something about hives and budget lines that made Judy laugh outright.
Doris took her time gathering her coat, still shooting me a look every few seconds that promised this conversation was not over, not by a long shot.
Judy hugged everyone on her way out, including Derek, who accepted it with the stiff, startled patience of a man who had clearly not been warned that hugging was on the agenda.
I stayed behind to erase the board, not because it needed erasing yet, but because it gave my hands something to do that wasn't reaching for my phone to text Maddie a very long message about exactly how wrong she was.
"You did good tonight," Derek said, from somewhere behind me. I hadn't heard him stay.
"I had help." I didn't turn around right away, mostly because I needed a second to arrange my face into something that wasn't whatever it had been doing for the last hour. "You backed me on the cabin. And the ice. And the fireworks."
"You were right on all three."
"You could have let Judy win one. Just to keep the peace."
"That's not really how I decide things." He said it simply, no defensiveness in it, just a fact laid down the way he laid most things down. "I don't back an idea because it's yours. I back it because it's the one that doesn't get somebody hurt."
"That's a very practical way to be nice to a person."
"I'm not being nice. I'm being accurate."
I turned around, and he was still standing near the door in his coat, hands in his pockets, watching me with an expression I was getting far too familiar with and far too fond of. For one long second neither of us said anything. The string lights buzzed faintly overhead.
"Goodnight, Chief," I said finally, because somebody had to say something, and I didn't trust myself to say anything that wasn't going to give Maddie exactly the confirmation she was already convinced she had.
"Goodnight, Leah."
He said my name like it cost him something to say it plainly, no title in front of it, no joke wrapped around it. I stood there long after the door shut behind him, holding a whiteboard eraser, doing nothing but replaying the sound of it.