13. Leah
LEAH
The town square had transformed overnight into something I'd only ever built on a laptop screen.
String lights arced tree to tree in wide gold lines, vendor tents lined the walking path in two neat rows, and the whole place smelled like cider and woodsmoke and fry bread, close enough that my stomach growled twice before nine in the morning.
Six weeks of planning had finally turned into an actual place a person could stand in, and I stood at the mouth of the square for one full minute before I let myself walk into it, just to memorize what it looked like before the crowds got here and started asking me things.
They started asking me things almost immediately.
"Leah. Leah, the tent pole's bent." A woman named Carol Anne, who ran a booth selling hand-knit mittens, waved me over with the particular urgency of someone convinced her entire livelihood hinged on the next ninety seconds. "It's leaning. I think it's going to come down on the mittens."
I straightened the pole, wedged a folded flyer under the base where the ground had frozen unevenly, and had her stable again inside two minutes, the mittens safe from their brush with structural collapse.
"You're good at this," Carol Anne said, sounding faintly surprised, like she'd expected the U-Haul girl to be better at causing disasters than fixing them.
"I've had practice." I didn't say practice at what. Two years of Denver weddings had a way of preparing a person for exactly this kind of morning.
I fixed a card reader that wouldn't connect for the woodworker two booths down, walked a nervous first time vendor through where the fire lane actually started so she'd stop apologizing to every passerby for a violation she wasn't even committing, and talked Doris out of moving her cider stand six feet to the left for the third time in an hour, a negotiation that ended only when I promised her the extra foot traffic from staying put was worth more than the marginally better sun angle.
"You're bossy," Doris said, not unkindly, ladling cider into a paper cup for a kid who'd wandered up mid-negotiation. "I like it."
"I prefer decisive."
"Bossy works fine for me." She handed the cup over and turned her attention back to me before the kid had even said thank you.
"Heard you settled things with Ida Kowalski's nephew about that chimney.
Heard you talked the county board into an extra week on the vendor permits.
Heard a lot of things about you lately, Leah Bennett, and not one of them is about a U-Haul anymore. "
Something in my chest went warm that had nothing to do with the cider steam curling up between us.
"Careful, Doris. You're going to make me think this town likes me."
"This town's cautious. Liking takes longer than a month." She smiled anyway, the kind of smile that undercut everything cautious about the sentence itself. "But you're getting there."
A wreath vendor and a candle vendor nearly came to actual blows over six inches of shared table space around half past nine, both of them convinced the other had crept over some invisible line in the night, and I settled it by producing a tape measure from my coat pocket like a magician pulling out a rabbit, marking the boundary in chalk, and handing each of them a folding chair from my own trunk as a goodwill gesture neither had asked for but both accepted immediately.
"You just carry a tape measure around?" the candle vendor said, somewhere between impressed and suspicious.
"I carry several things around. You'd be amazed."
That was three crises solved before ten in the morning, and I felt something loosen in my shoulders that had been wound tight since the day Judy first said my name in that meeting room, the sense that I was still auditioning for a role the town hadn't fully cast me in yet.
Nobody today had called me the U-Haul girl. Nobody had needed to.
The carolers started up near the gazebo around ten, eight singers in matching red scarves working their way through a set list that grew looser with every verse, the soprano line drifting flat by the second chorus and nobody in the group seeming to notice or particularly care.
I loved them instantly and completely, off key and unbothered, exactly the kind of imperfect that made a town square feel like somewhere real people actually lived instead of somewhere I'd built out of a spreadsheet.
I was three vendor crises deep and feeling genuinely, dangerously competent when the fudge tent went wrong.
I heard it before I saw it, a hiss and a small startled shout from the vendor at the propane stove. By the time I turned, a blue and orange flame had jumped off the burner and was licking at spilled oil near the fry bread tent right beside it.
I did not hold my breath. I think I actually made a sound, something between a gasp and a warning nobody could have used in time anyway, and I was already moving, uselessly, toward a fire I had no idea how to fight.
Derek got there first.
He didn't run, not exactly, but he covered the distance from wherever he'd been standing to the fudge tent in what felt like four steps, grabbed the lid off a nearby stockpot without asking anyone's permission, and dropped it directly over the flame in one clean, unhurried motion that smothered the whole thing before I'd even finished my useless half step forward.
The fire went out like it had simply changed its mind about existing.
The square went dead silent for exactly one beat, and then somebody near the caroling group started clapping, and the applause spread fast and warm across the whole crowd like it had been waiting for a reason.
"That's why we don't run open propane next to the fry bread tent," Derek said, not looking up from the pot, already checking the burner valve with the flat, unbothered competence of a man who did this kind of thing so often it had stopped registering as an event. "Noted for next year."
"Noted for next year." I finally found my voice, though it came out about an octave higher than I intended. "You're extremely calm for a man who just prevented a fireball."
"It wasn't going to be a fireball."
"It looked like a fireball."
"It looked like a small grease flare that lasted four seconds." He set the pot down, checked the fudge vendor's hands for burns with brisk, professional efficiency, and satisfied himself she was fine before he even glanced back at me. "Fireballs are a different call entirely. I'd have moved you."
"That's supposed to be reassuring?"
"It's supposed to be accurate."
I laughed before I could stop myself, a shaky, relieved sound that came out louder than I meant it to, and half the crowd around us laughed too, the tension breaking into something warmer, and the fudge vendor pressed both hands together and thanked Derek so many times he eventually just nodded and stepped back to let her get on with her day.
"You okay?" he asked me, once the crowd had thinned back into its usual wandering current.
"I nearly had a heart attack watching you not have one."
"That tracks."
By noon the square had settled into the easy rhythm I'd been chasing since the first pitch meeting in Derek's break room, families drifting between booths with cocoa cups steaming in their hands, kids racing each other around the gazebo, the carolers finally finding something close to harmony on their fourth pass through the same three songs.
I found myself standing near the cocoa stand with an empty cup of my own, watching the whole thing breathe the way I'd only ever imagined it breathing, and something settled in my chest that felt dangerously close to pride.
"There you are." Maddie appeared at my elbow the way she always did, like she'd been standing just outside my line of sight waiting for the exact right moment. "Look up."
"Why would I look up?"
"Because I'm asking nicely. For once."
I looked up. A small sprig of mistletoe hung directly over the spot where I was standing, tied with a thin red ribbon to the cocoa stand's wooden frame, entirely too tidy and far too convenient to be an accident.
"Maddie."
"What?" She blinked at me with the particular innocence of a woman who had clearly planned every second of this. "I have no idea how that got there."
"You hung that mistletoe."
"Me? I own a coffee shop, not a hardware store. I don't go around town hanging festive foliage over people's heads." Her grin was doing absolutely nothing to sell the denial. "Huh. Wonder how that got there."
"You are the least subtle person I have ever met."
"I prefer thorough." She was already backing away, already grinning at something over my shoulder, and I turned to find Derek walking toward the cocoa stand with two cups in his hands, entirely unaware he was walking directly into a trap six weeks in the making.
"They ran out of the cider you liked," he said, holding one cup out to me, "so I got you cocoa instead. Figured you wouldn't file a complaint."
"I might still file a complaint. On principle."
"Noted. I'll expect the paperwork within the week." He caught sight of my face, then followed my eyes upward, and I watched the exact moment he registered what was hanging over both our heads, his expression shifting from confusion to something considerably more careful.
"That's new," he said.
"Maddie's doing. She's denying it. Convincingly, if you don't know her."
"I know her." He didn't step back. That was the part I noticed most, the fact that a man who'd spent six weeks keeping a careful, deliberate distance between us in every professional setting we'd shared didn't retreat now, not with half the town watching.
I sensed it before I understood it, the whole square's attention swinging toward us.
Vendors glanced over from their booths. The carolers' harmony faltered for half a beat, and Doris went very still behind her cider stand.
For one dizzy second I didn't care who was watching, and some reckless, unguarded part of me leaned into it instead of away.
Derek leaned in.
It happened slow, unhurried, the same deliberate way he did everything, his eyes on mine the whole way down. I could feel the warmth of his breath against my cold cheeks, and every other sound in the square seemed to drop away.
His radio erupted.
The dispatcher's voice cut through the moment with the flat, businesslike urgency of an actual emergency, some address out past the ranger station, and Derek's whole posture changed before the sentence even finished, the careful stillness snapping instantly into motion.
"I have to."
"Go."
He was already moving, already halfway to a jog before the word fully left me, and I watched him cross the square toward his truck without looking back once, radio still crackling against his hip, the crowd parting for him the way it always did, like the whole town had learned the shape of that kind of urgency and knew better than to stand in it.
I stood there under the mistletoe long after his truck had cleared the lot, cocoa going cold in my hand, the square's attention slowly drifting back to its own business around me, the carolers finding their harmony again, Doris pretending very hard not to be watching me while absolutely watching me.
I pressed two fingers to my own lips, standing alone under a ribbon tied by my own best friend.
The almost kiss felt more real than the real thing might have, warm and unfinished, mine to keep until the world interrupted us again.
Eventually I finished my cocoa, gathered my clipboard, and went back to work, though it took me longer than it should have to remember what I'd been doing before he leaned in.