Page 90 of Honeyfires

"At what?"

"Making people comfortable with themselves."

Jackson considered this. "She treats everyone like they already belong," he said. "People feel that."

He wasn't wrong. She'd been here forty-five minutes and had already extracted Cassie's theory about the Outlander plotlines to discuss with Rodriguez's wife at a later date, learned that one of the seasonals from the Prescott assignment had a daughter who'd recently learned to read and was very into books about dogs, and discovered that Rodriguez's father was the one who'd originally suggested the barbecue tradition decades ago, which Rodriguez had not mentioned and which he confirmed with what I could only describe as sheepish respect.

"Rodriguez is sheepish," I said to Vera, during a moment when we were briefly alone together at the edge of the patio.

"He's also the kind of man who credits others for things, which means he understands attribution." She stole a chip from my plate. "Firefighters all sound remarkable to me."

"We really are." I caught her hand, held it, laughing at the look she shot me. "You're doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you make a room feel like you've always been in it."

She smiled at me. "You're doing the thing where you say something that makes it impossible for me to stop smiling for the rest of the afternoon."

"We're even then."

She kissed me openly in front of the crew and the seasonals and the remnants of the potato salad, and I didn't care even slightly.

The afternoon settled into its rhythm. Rodriguez held court at the grill, dispensing opinions about marinade that no one disagreed with because he was right. Miller finished his first beer and started a second at approximately the pace of a glacier. Jackson and Cassie got into a mock-serious disagreement about the cornhole tiebreaker rules that Stevens had printed out and laminated—he'd actually laminated them, because of course he had—and three separate seasonals got pulled into it before Vera stepped in and settled it with a ruling so logically ironclad that everyone accepted it immediately and Stevens looked at her like she'd performed a miracle.

"She'd be a good incident commander," Davids said to me, watching her explain the tiebreaker logic to a seasonal named Cruz who'd arrived late and needed catching up.

"She runs a library," I said.

"Same skill set."

He wasn't wrong about that either.

Vera had been pulled into a conversation at the far picnic table, something about the Painted Rock fire from two seasons back, where Davids and two of the other seasonals had been on engine support while my crew went in by air. It was the kind of story that got told at barbecues, heavily edited for civilian company, but Vera wasn't quite civilian, not anymore, not after the station visit and the rope cache and the crew-chief seat of La Jefa.

"—and Alves comes rappelling down like something out of a movie, lands right in the middle of it, looks around, and the first thing she says is—"

"Where's my Pulaski," I said, from across the patio. "I had it when I went up."

The crew who'd been there lost it. Vera's hand found mine under the table.

"That tracks," she said. "She has a method for where things go."

"She does," Miller confirmed, from the end of the table. He'd been there for two hours. Still nursing that second beer, which looked like it had gone room-temperature. Watching everything. "The label-maker wasn't a surprise."

"I don't have a—" I stopped. "I use the label-maker for gear identification. That's operationally necessary."

"She labeled the coffee shelf," Stevens said, to general laughter.

"The coffee shelf needed clarification—"

"It had two items on it," Jackson said. "Coffee and the coffeemaker."

"Organization is proactive, not reactive—"

"She's exactly like this at home," Vera said cheerfully to the table, and everyone laughed, and I looked at the ceiling, which was the sky, so that didn't work as well as I needed it to.

Stevens had organized a cornhole tournament on a bracket he'd drawn on a piece of paper that kept getting more elaborate as the afternoon went on. By the time Vera was recruited into it, there were tiebreaker rules, a loser's bracket, and a penalty round involving hot sauce that had been contributed enthusiastically by Cruz.