36. Leah
LEAH
The festival grounds had turned into a controlled disaster overnight, half the booths still skeletal frames waiting on canvas, sawdust and pine needles trampled into slush.
In the middle of it stood a six-foot ice sculpture, meant to be a leaping stag, currently just a vaguely animal-shaped block dripping under a weak sun.
The sculptor himself, a wiry man named Anton who had driven up from Denver with a truck full of chisels and an ego to match, stood over his half-formed stag with both hands pressed to his temples like the placement of a fry bread tent had personally wounded him.
"I cannot create ART fourteen feet from the fry bread tent." He said it like a diagnosis. "The grease particulates will ruin the finish. Ice remembers everything it is exposed to. Everything."
"It's frozen water, Anton."
"It is a MEDIUM." He turned to face me fully, chisel still in one gloved hand, gesturing with it in a way that made me take an involuntary step back. "You would not ask a painter to work next to a deep fryer."
"I would absolutely ask a painter to work next to a deep fryer if the painter's contract had specified this exact location three weeks ago. Yours did."
He stared at me for a long moment, chisel still raised, and I stared back, refusing to be the first one to blink in a standoff that had apparently become about more than booth placement.
"Move the fry bread tent."
"The fry bread tent has been in that exact spot for six years. Doris will set something on fire before she moves that tent."
"Then I quit." He set the chisel down on his tarp with the solemn finality of a man surrendering a sword. "I cannot in good conscience finish a piece that will be remembered for smelling like funnel cake instead of standing as art."
I looked at the stag, half melted, one antler already looking more like a stick than anything majestic, and made an executive decision I did not have time to second guess.
"I'll move you. Six feet left. Not the tent. You."
Something in his face shifted, calculation replacing outrage. "Six feet."
"Six feet, better light, and you're out of the wind coming off the bonfire pit, which was probably doing more damage to that finish than fry oil ever could."
He picked the chisel back up like nothing had happened at all, already muttering something about repositioning under his breath, and I walked away before he could reconsider quitting a second time that morning.
The morning went like that in miniature, one small crisis solved just in time to discover two more waiting behind it, a rhythm I had gotten embarrassingly good at over the last two months.
A popcorn vendor needed a second outlet.
A hay bale delivery had gone to the wrong address entirely, currently sitting outside the elementary school for reasons nobody could adequately explain.
I fixed what I could fix and wrote the rest down for later, the way I always did, and kept moving.
Two booths down, Doris and a vendor named Hector were locked in a dispute over an extra foot of frontage that had apparently existed in some gray zone between their contracts, both of them gesturing at a tape measure like it had personally betrayed one of them.
"The map says six feet, Doris."
"The map is wrong. It's been wrong since Judy drew it on a napkin back in the summer."
I settled that one in about ninety seconds by splitting the difference and promising Hector a corner spot next year, and moved on before either of them could reopen the case.
Judy found me somewhere in the middle of all of it, clipboard against her chest, eyes bright with the specific gleam that meant a budget was about to get a lot more complicated.
"I've been thinking about the finale."
"The finale's finalized, Judy. We locked the fireworks vendor two weeks ago."
"I know we locked a vendor. I am talking about locking a better one.
" She flipped her clipboard around to show me a glossy brochure for a display roughly triple the size of what we had budgeted, complete with a closing barrage that promised to be visible from three counties over.
"This is what a record turnout deserves, Leah. Not a nice display. A legendary one."
"This costs four times what we approved."
"Legendary things generally do."
"We don't have four times the budget. We have the budget we have."
"Then find four times the budget." She said it with the total confidence of a woman who had never once had to reconcile a spreadsheet in her life. "You found money for the extra egress route. You found money for the second ham at the firehouse dinner, allegedly. Find this."
"The second ham was Sarge's grocery budget, not mine, and egress routes are a safety requirement, not a want."
"This is also a safety requirement. This town's reputation is what's riding on it."
I did not have an answer for that, mostly because there was not a good one, and Judy took my silence as the opening she had clearly been hoping for.
"Just think about it."
"I will think about it exactly as much as the number on that brochure deserves, which is not very much."
She swept off toward the next crisis, entirely undeterred, and I made a note on my own clipboard to check with our actual vendor about literally anything smaller and cheaper than whatever Judy had just shown me, before she found a way to sign a contract herself.
Judy circled back an hour later, and this time she was not alone. A younger woman stood beside her, dark-haired and a little sheepish, hand tucked into Judy's like she had been walked over on purpose.
"Leah, darling, this is my daughter, Grace.
" Judy's whole face had gone soft in a way I had not seen it do all week, the festival brightness replaced with something quieter and more real.
"Grace got engaged over the holiday. I may have mentioned, several times, that there was only one person in this town qualified to plan it. "
"Mom." Grace looked equal parts embarrassed and hopeful. "You really don't have to say yes. She's been telling everyone in a four-block radius."
"Would you plan the wedding of the century?" Judy asked, entirely unbothered by her own daughter's mortification, gripping Grace's hand like she might float away otherwise. "No pressure."
Grace mouthed sorry at me over her mother's shoulder, genuinely sincere, and I found I did not mind even a little.
"When's the date?" I asked, mostly to buy myself one more second before I said yes and made it official.
"Next autumn. Long engagement. Long enough that my mother has time to redesign the whole ceremony at least four times before we actually need any of it finalized."
"I heard that," Judy said, not remotely offended.
I looked between them, this whole town's mayor asking me, actual nerves showing through the usual bluster, to build the most important day of her daughter's life. Something in my chest went warm and a little disbelieving.
"I would be honored."
Judy made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob and pulled us both into a hug that smelled like peppermint and clipboard ink, and Grace caught my eye over her mother's shoulder with an expression that said clearly, silently, thank you for saying yes to this circus.
This was a third client, a third real wedding, real budget, real trust. It came from a woman who had watched me build sponsorship packets in a folding chair meeting what felt like a hundred years ago and had decided, somewhere along the way, that I was worth betting on.
I thought of Sydney Marsh crying happy tears into a cup of cider a week earlier, of the ice rink proposal before that, and wondered when exactly Bennett Events had stopped being a gamble and started being simply true.
I found a quiet corner behind the gazebo an hour later, notebook balanced on one knee, trying to write the toast I owed this town in two days and had exactly zero working drafts of.
Draft one: To Pinewood Ridge, a place that took in a stranger with a dented trailer and somehow made her feel like she belonged before she had even unpacked the second box.
I read it back and crossed it out. Too generic. Every toast in the history of small towns had probably opened with some version of that sentence.
Draft two: This town gave me a business, a home, and the kind of found family I did not know I was allowed to want. It also gave me Derek Walsh, who I would very much like to marry someday, so...
I stared at that one for a long moment before laughing out loud, alone, behind a gazebo, at my own handwriting.
"Okay," I said to nobody. "That one accidentally proposed to the whole town. Try again."
Draft three came out safer, cleaner, three sentences about gratitude and growth and a festival that had exceeded every projection I had handed the county in writing. I read it back twice and felt absolutely nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
I texted a photo of draft three to Maddie, mostly for a second opinion.
She replied within thirty seconds. Boring.
Where is the part where you say his name in front of the entire county?
I typed back that this was a professional toast to a town, not a wedding speech, and she sent back a single row of laughing emoji that felt entirely too accurate for my comfort.
I closed the notebook without a fourth attempt, mostly because my hands had gone cold and partly because I suspected the real problem was not the words.
Everything true I wanted to say about this town led straight back to one particular fire chief.
I hadn't figured out how to thank four hundred strangers for a life without accidentally telling them, before I'd told him myself, how much of that life was actually about him.
I looked up from the notebook and found him across the square, leaning against the side of the ladder truck with his arms crossed and a coffee going cold in one hand, watching me the way he did sometimes when he thought I had not noticed yet.
He was not doing anything. He was not moving toward me, was not waving, was not even pretending to look busy the way most people did when they got caught staring.
He was just watching, open and unguarded and a little helpless about it, an expression on his face I did not have a clean word for except maybe the one I had just crossed out three separate times in the notebook on my knee.
Something in my chest ached, wanting this so completely it almost embarrassed me. This town, this life, this man, standing forty feet away in the weak afternoon light like he had nowhere else he'd rather be.
I lifted a hand. He lifted his coffee back at me instead of waving, which was such a Derek response that I laughed out loud again, alone, delighted, and went back to work with my whole chest still doing that warm, unfamiliar thing.
Anton called out something about the light changing behind me, already absorbed back into his stag like the whole standoff over the fry bread tent had never happened, and I let myself have one more look across the square before I turned back to my own list. Derek had not moved.
He was still right there, still watching, like he had nowhere better to be than exactly where he was.
The wind kicked up sometime after that, hard enough to rattle every half-finished booth across the square and send a loose tarp cartwheeling toward the bonfire pit before somebody caught it, and neither of us looked twice.
Just wind. Just weather, same as it had been all week, nothing in it worth the attention of two people too busy watching each other to notice anything else.