26. Leah
LEAH
The kids' craft tent smelled like burnt sugar and hot glue, both of which were apparently load bearing when it came to gingerbread architecture, and I stood at the judging table with a clipboard I had no intention of using yet, watching six seven-year-olds treat royal icing like structural mortar and mostly fail.
Derek found me there a little after nine, two coffees in hand, one of which he passed over without a word.
"You're up early."
"Couldn't sleep past six." He said it plainly, no weight added to it, and I studied his face for the strain I'd half expected after last night, the kind of exhaustion that usually came from a person handing over something they'd kept locked down for two years.
I didn't find it. What I found instead was something quieter, steadier, like a held breath had finally been let go.
"How are you feeling? Really."
"Lighter." He turned the word over like he was testing whether it still fit. "I keep waiting for it to feel like a mistake, telling you all of it. It doesn't."
"I'm not going to treat you differently because of it."
"I know. That's part of why it doesn't feel like a mistake."
"Does it help? Having said it."
"More than I expected." He watched a nearby gingerbread roof slide slowly off its walls and collapse into a heap of sugared rubble, unbothered, like this was simply the natural order of things. "Mike would have liked you."
"Yeah?"
"He liked anyone who could hold their own against me.
You'd have driven him half crazy arguing about fire code, and he'd have loved every second of it.
" Something almost like a real smile crossed his face, the first time I'd heard him mention his friend without his whole body going tight around the name.
"I want to tell you more about him sometime. Not today. Just, eventually."
"Eventually is fine. I'm not in a hurry."
"I know that too." He looked at me a beat longer than the moment strictly required, and I let him, because some things didn't need to be filled with words to land exactly where they were supposed to.
A crash from the craft table interrupted whatever might have come next, followed immediately by a chorus of small, delighted screams.
"Miss Leah! Tommy's roof fell on the reindeer!"
I turned in time to see the full scope of the disaster.
Tommy Alvarez's gingerbread house had apparently decided gravity was optional right up until the exact moment it wasn't, and the entire roof panel now lay flat across a sugar cookie reindeer that had, until thirty seconds ago, been standing proudly on the front lawn.
"It's a redesign," Tommy announced, undeterred, frosting smeared from his chin to somewhere near his ear. "The reindeer's inside now. It's cozier."
"That's certainly one way to handle a collapse, Tommy."
Two tables over, a girl named Priya, no relation to the firefighter as far as I knew, had clearly decided the judging criteria favored volume over structural integrity, and had built a wall so thick with frosting that her house resembled less a cottage and more a small, defensive fortress under siege from its own decorations.
Beside her, a boy named Dylan sat with visible frosting on both cheeks, one hand still gripping a chunk of gingerbread that used to be, according to the small hand-lettered sign propped beside his creation, the roof.
"Dylan," I said carefully, "did you eat the roof?"
He looked at me, chewing, without a trace of guilt.
"It's a design choice."
Derek made a sound beside me that took real effort to disguise as a cough, and I bit down hard on my own laugh, mostly out of professional obligation to at least appear as though structural collapse and roof consumption were serious violations worth addressing.
"A design choice," I repeated.
"Open concept." He swallowed the last bite with the total confidence of a boy who had clearly thought this through. "You can see right into the living room now."
"There's icing in your eyebrow."
"That's the snow."
Beside him, Priya's defensive fortress finally gave out under its own frosting, one wall sagging sideways into the next until the whole structure folded flat with a soft, sugary sigh.
"It survived a siege," she announced, undaunted, surveying the wreckage like a general assessing an acceptable loss. "That counts for something."
"Does it, though?" Dylan asked, already eyeing what remained of her gumdrop supply.
"It does to me."
I gave up right there, laughing hard enough that Derek had to steady the coffee out of my hand before I spilled it.
Around the tent a dozen other small disasters unfolded in real time, walls sliding, roofs sagging, one ambitious two-story house folding in on itself completely.
Sugar high had fully taken hold by ten, kids sprinting between tables with fistfuls of gumdrops, at least one full-scale icing fight breaking out near the back that I decided, as a strategic matter, not to notice.
"You built this whole event, you know," Derek said quietly, watching the chaos with something like real fondness. "A year ago this town didn't have anything like it."
"I had help."
"You had a permit process and a fire code. That's not the same as help." He glanced at me sideways. "You built this."
"You're going to make me cry in front of a gingerbread crime scene."
"I'll allow it. Seems like an appropriate setting."
I didn't have an answer for that yet, nothing that felt small enough to say out loud in the middle of a gingerbread massacre, so I let it sit there instead, warm and a little overwhelming, and turned back to judging a contest that had, by every reasonable metric, already descended into anarchy.
By noon the craft tent had emptied into the general festival crowd, and I left it in Maddie's capable hands long enough to walk the four blocks to Main Street, where my own reckoning waited under a banner Doris had insisted on lettering by hand instead of ordering printed, because, in her words, printed banners had no soul.
GRAND OPENING, it read, hand-painted gold letters against deep green, strung across the front window of the storefront that had been nothing but bare studs and sawdust three months ago and was now, improbably, mine.
Bennett Events and Weddings, painted fresh on the glass beneath it, the letters still smelling faintly of the varnish I'd sealed them with two nights before.
A crowd had already gathered by the time I got there, more people than I'd braced myself for, spilling off the sidewalk and into the street where somebody had strung up extra lights just for the occasion.
Doris stood front and center holding a pair of oversized scissors like she'd been waiting her whole life for exactly this moment, a wide red ribbon stretched taut across the doorway behind her.
"There she is." Doris waved me forward with the scissors, far too pleased with herself. "Get up here. This is your moment, not mine, though I fully intend to enjoy it anyway."
"Doris, you really didn't have to do a whole ceremony."
"Of course I did. You think Pinewood Ridge lets a business open without proper fanfare?
We are not a town that does things quietly.
" She pressed the scissors into my hands, closing my fingers around the handles with the brisk authority of a woman used to being obeyed.
"This town's needed someone like you longer than you know.
Somebody who actually shows up. Now cut the ribbon before I do it for you. "
My hands were shaking a little, which I blamed on the cold even though the air was still and clear and not particularly cold at all, and I looked out at the crowd gathered along the sidewalk, waiting, and felt the shake settle into something closer to disbelief.
Half the town had turned out. Judy stood near the front in her good coat, phone already raised to record.
Katie and her fiancé had come straight from a cake tasting, judging by the frosting still on Katie's sleeve.
The whole diner crew had closed up for twenty minutes, from the look of it, just to be here, and past them, unmistakable even in the crowd, stood six firefighters in matching navy T-shirts that hadn't existed the last time I'd seen any of them.
Sarge stepped forward before I could ask, holding one up by the shoulders so I could read the front. BENNETT EVENTS AND WEDDINGS, it read, and beneath it, smaller, in a font clearly chosen for maximum smugness: Official Vendor of Structural Compliance.
"We got you a gift." Sarge presented it with both hands like a man bestowing a medal. "It is also mockery. Both things are true."
"You put your own department on my shirt!"
"We put ourselves on your shirt because we're proud of you, and also because Priya thought it was funny, and I have never once in my career overruled Priya on a matter of comedy.
" He handed shirts down the line, Tomás already pulling his on over his uniform, grinning wide enough to show most of his teeth.
"Official Vendor of Structural Compliance," Tomás read aloud, admiring his own sleeve. "Best thing anyone's ever put me in, and I own a dress uniform."
"You wore that to a house fire once and cried a little," Priya said. "Don't let him fool you, Leah. He's sentimental about laundry."
"Cut the ribbon, boss. We've got a whole tent of gingerbread to go inspect for code violations."
I laughed, and it came out thick, and I pressed the back of one hand briefly against my eyes before anyone could look too closely.
"It's cold," I said, to no one in particular.
"Sure it is," Doris said, not convinced for a second, and not remotely subtle about it.
I cut the ribbon. It fell in two clean pieces to the sidewalk, and the crowd made a sound somewhere between applause and outright cheering, loud enough that a couple passing on the far side of the street stopped to see what they'd missed.
I stood there in the doorway of my own storefront, ribbon at my feet, a whole town looking back at me like this mattered, like I mattered. My chest went tight with it.
I built this.
Not performed it for somebody else's approval, the way I used to smile through Denver weddings that were never actually about me, always reading a room for what it wanted instead of what I did.
Not waited for permission or a man in a nice suit to decide I was worth keeping.
I had built this storefront board by board.
I'd argued fire code line by line until I understood it better than most contractors, and stayed up past midnight redrawing sleigh routes to meet every setback Derek had ever quoted me.
None of it had needed anyone's approval to be real.
It was mine. It had been mine the whole time, actually.
I'd just needed a town like this one to finally believe it alongside me.
I looked past the crowd, past Doris still beaming and Sarge already herding firefighters toward the gingerbread tent, and found Derek standing near the back, arms crossed loose over his chest, not saying anything at all, just watching me with an expression he wasn't bothering to hide from anyone, grinning like an idiot in a way I'd never once seen him do in public before today.
Sarge caught the look too, clearly, because he drifted back over and elbowed him hard enough to knock him half a step sideways.
"Yeah, yeah," Sarge said, loud enough that I caught it clean across the sidewalk. "You're proud of her. We all see it."
Derek didn't deny it. He didn't even try, just kept right on grinning, watching me the whole time like the ribbon cutting and the crowd and the banner overhead were the least interesting things happening on that street, and that, somehow, was the biggest tell of the entire afternoon.