38. Leah
LEAH
Frost coated every tent stake across the festival grounds when I got there before first light, the grass crunching white and stiff under my boots.
My breath fogged thick enough to blur the outline of the bonfire pit, swept clean and waiting at the center of it all.
Somewhere behind me a generator coughed to life, and somewhere ahead of me Judy was already shouting at somebody about extension cords, and I stood there for one long second just breathing it in, cold and sharp and finally, finally here.
The town had been building toward this morning since the first planning meeting back in a folding chair with three attendees and a stack of borrowed card tables.
Now half of Pinewood Ridge seemed to be swarming the square at once, vendors hauling tent frames upright, volunteers stringing the last of the lights.
Somewhere in the middle of it a brass band was tuning up with the kind of enthusiasm that suggested nobody there had practiced together before today.
"Leah!" Judy bore down on me with a clipboard clutched to her chest like a shield, breath puffing out in urgent little clouds. "Fireworks at midnight, the bonfire lit at eleven-forty, and if anyone asks, yes, I approved a slightly larger budget than the county knows about."
"Judy."
"It's a wonderful budget. It's a responsible budget. It simply exists in a category the county doesn't need full visibility into."
"That's not how budgets work."
"It's exactly how budgets work when you're the mayor.
" She flipped a page, scanning it with the particular intensity of a woman running on coffee and pure adrenaline.
"Vendor check-in starts in two hours. The stage crew needs a final walkthrough.
And somebody needs to tell Anton his stag has developed a crack down one antler overnight, because I am not doing it. "
"Why not you?"
"Because he cried the last time I gave him notes, Leah, actual tears, and I have exactly zero bandwidth left today for an emotional ice sculptor."
I laughed despite the hour, despite the cold biting through two layers, and let her sweep off toward the stage with the same relentless energy she'd been running on since the first frost of the season.
Frost still clung to the underside of the gazebo railing when I passed it, catching the first weak light in a way that looked, for one unguarded second, like something out of a postcard.
Maddie found me near the hot cocoa stand twenty minutes later, enormous now in a way that made every coat she owned look like it belonged to somebody else, one hand braced against the small of her back and an expression on her face that dared anyone within earshot to comment on it.
"Don't," she said, before I'd even opened my mouth.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were going to ask if I should be standing this long. Josh already asked me four times before I left the house. I told him if he asked a fifth time I was naming the baby after his least favorite uncle."
"Did that work?"
"Spectacularly. He drove me here himself and then made me promise not to lift so much as a folding chair." She rolled her eyes, though the fondness underneath it was impossible to miss. "He's currently guarding the cocoa stand like it contains state secrets, just so I have a reason to stand still."
"He's not wrong. I'd hover too."
"I know he's not wrong. That doesn't mean I have to enjoy being managed.
" She accepted the cup Josh handed her a moment later without so much as looking at him, the two of them clearly having run this exact routine a dozen times already that morning, and took a slow sip with the satisfied look of a woman who had absolutely no intention of admitting how tired she actually was.
"You look glowing," I told her, and meant it.
"I look like I swallowed a beach ball and I'm regretting every life choice that led here." She grinned anyway, wide and delighted despite the complaint. "But yes, also glowing, apparently. Everyone keeps saying that like it's supposed to make the back pain worth it."
"Does it?"
"Ask me again in three weeks when this thing actually arrives."
The morning kept unspooling in warm, chaotic pieces after that, one small crisis after another solved in the time it took to walk from one end of the square to the other.
A generator refused to start until Tomás swore at it creatively enough to shame it into cooperating.
Doris discovered her fry bread oil had frozen solid overnight and required a small miracle and two space heaters to thaw it back into usable condition.
Somewhere near the ice rink, a group of kids had already claimed the best viewing spot for the fireworks display and were guarding it with the seriousness of soldiers holding a border.
Near the face painting booth, a toddler had gotten hold of an entire tray of red paint and turned herself into what her father proudly described as a very small, very committed vampire, and nobody had the heart to make her wash it off before the doors even opened.
Sarge intercepted me near the equipment tent, arms crossed, surveying the chaos with the satisfied expression of a man who had personally signed off on every safety measure currently keeping it from tipping over into an actual emergency.
"Feels different this year," he said. "Bigger."
"Bigger's good, right?"
"More people to keep track of, is what it is.
I like it fine. I like it better when the paperwork's done, and yours is done, so I'm not complaining.
" He nodded toward the heater bank lined up along the bonfire pit's edge, tags fluttering in the cold breeze.
"Priya double checked every one of those this morning before you even got here.
If you're worried, don't be. That woman doesn't miss things. "
"I'm not worried. I'm cautiously optimistic, which is different."
"Cautiously optimistic is the closest thing to actual optimism anybody in this job ever gets to feel.
" He clapped me once on the shoulder, gruff and warm at the same time, and moved off toward the stage, where Judy had apparently escalated her tempo argument with the brass band into something requiring mediation.
"This is chaos," I said to nobody in particular, watching Judy argue with the brass band about tempo while Anton wept softly over his cracked antler in the background.
"Good chaos," Maddie said, appearing at my elbow with a second cup of cocoa she absolutely should not have needed. "The kind you'll miss in a week when it's just you and a stack of thank you notes."
"I don't think I'll miss the ice sculpture crying."
"You'll miss it a little. Don't lie to me. I've known you ten years."
She wasn't wrong, and I let the thought sit there warm in my chest as I moved on to the next item on my list, checking booth placements against a map that had been redrawn so many times it barely resembled the original anymore.
The morning felt bright, and it had nothing to do with the pale winter sun finally clearing the tree line.
It felt full in a way I hadn't let myself expect back when this whole festival was just a stack of borrowed folding tables.
I did my final safety walk an hour before doors opened, clipboard in hand, checking off exit routes and heater placements against the map Sarge had drawn weeks earlier, the one with the extra route behind the church that had felt like overkill in planning and now just felt like good sense.
Everything matched. Every heater sat exactly where it was supposed to, tagged and certified, spaced the way Priya had insisted they needed to be spaced.
I was circling back past the bonfire pit and the bank of propane heaters lined up along its edge when something caught in the back of my throat, faint but unmistakably wrong, threading through the familiar smell of pine and cold earth.
I stopped walking.
It wasn't woodsmoke. I knew woodsmoke, had smelled it constantly for two months straight from every stall and bonfire test this festival had run. This was sharper, thinner, something closer to the smell that clung to Derek's turnout gear after a call, chemical underneath and faintly sour.
"Does that smell right to anyone else?" I called toward the crew working the heater bank, keeping my voice steady even as my pulse ticked up a notch. "That's not woodsmoke."
Tomás straightened from where he'd been crouched over the third heater in the row, sniffing the air with the mild, unbothered expression of a man who smelled diesel and propane so often it barely registered anymore.
"Probably nothing," he said, already moving toward the source anyway. "We'll take a look before doors open."
"Can you look now?"
"Give me five minutes. Probably just residue off the last propane swap."
I stood there a moment longer, watching him crouch over the connections with a flashlight, running his hand along the fittings the way I'd watched Priya do a hundred times over the last few weeks.
Nothing sparked, nothing hissed, nothing looked visibly wrong from where I stood, and after a minute Tomás straightened again with a shrug that was probably meant to be reassuring.
"Nothing obvious. Could've just been somebody's truck exhaust drifting through. I'll keep an eye on it anyway."
"Thank you."
I told myself it was nothing, the same way I'd talked myself down from a hundred smaller festival panics this month, a missing extension cord here, a vendor showing up an hour late there, each one feeling catastrophic in the moment and forgettable an hour later.
This was probably exactly that. It was a stray smell, gone as quickly as it arrived, nothing underneath it but my own nerves running hot on the biggest day of the year.
I made myself walk on, finishing the rest of the safety pass exactly the way I'd planned it, ticking off boxes on a clipboard that no longer felt as satisfying to fill as it had an hour ago.
But I noticed myself glancing back toward that corner of the grounds more than once over the next hour, an itch under my skin I couldn't quite talk myself out of, the way you keep touching a bruise just to check if it still hurts.
By the time the gates opened, right on schedule, the whole square had transformed into exactly the postcard image Judy had been chasing since summer, string lights glowing warm against the pale morning sky, the smell of cocoa and fry bread finally winning out over everything else, families streaming in through the main entrance with the particular unhurried joy of people who had nowhere else they needed to be today.
Ember trotted past in his sweater to a chorus of delighted children.
Somewhere behind me, the brass band found its rhythm at last and struck up something bright and familiar.
I looked for Derek once, out of habit more than anything, scanning the crowd near the ladder truck where he usually stood during events like this.
He wasn't there yet, probably still finishing his own checklist somewhere behind the equipment tent, and I let myself feel the small, familiar disappointment of not spotting him before turning back to the growing crowd.
There would be time later. There was always time later, or there had been so far.
It should have felt like nothing but relief. It was months of work, finally paying off exactly the way I'd promised everyone it would.
And it did feel that way, mostly.
But some small, stubborn corner of my attention stayed fixed on the bonfire pit anyway, waiting for a smell that never quite came back and never quite left me alone either. I told myself it was nothing worth mentioning to anyone, and mostly believed it, right up until I didn't.