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“Lord. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to —”

“No. No, it’s fine. I’m sorry. You startled me.” Her voice was fine. She’d gotten her voice back before she’d gotten her hands down, because that was the thing she was good at. “I’m Sunny. I’m the housekeeper. You’re —”

“Pruitt. Fire department. Lord, I’m sorry, honey, I came up on you, I should’ve —”

“You didn’t do anything. It was the fireworks. I dropped my plate, that’s all.” She laughed, and it was very nearly right. “I’ll get another one. Enjoy the show.”

He went, apologizing, and she stood in the grass with her plate upside down at her feet and her heart still going and her hands shaking, and another rocket went up, gold, and three hundred people said “oh,” and not one of them had seen a thing, because they’d all been looking up.

One had.

He’d been fifty feet off with his brothers and he was beside her now, and she hadn’t seen him come, and he had a plate in his hand. Brisket. Beans. A roll. He’d built it on the way over, and he held it out to her, and he didn’t say a word.

She looked at the plate. She looked at him. His face wasn’t doing anything, not the grin, not the other thing, and his eyes were on hers and stayed there, and she understood that he’d seen all of it, the hand and the lurch and the plate and her hands going up, and that he knew exactly what he’d seen, and that he wasn’t going to ask.

She took the plate.

“Thank you.”

“Fork’s on the side.”

“I see it.”

He stood beside her. Not close. Not touching. A foot of dark between his arm and hers, the fireworks going up over the field. He watched them. She watched them. Her heart came down, slowly, and her hands stopped, and she ate a piece of brisket off a plate a man had built for her without being asked. It was the best thing she’d eaten in six weeks. She’d have died before she said so.

When the last one went, the big one, the one everybody had waited for, he said, “Pruitt’s all right. He’d have cut his own hand off before he scared you.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.” He looked at the sky, where the smoke was. “You want to sit down a minute or you want to go back in?”

“Go back in.”

“All right.”

And he walked her back to the pavilion at her own speed, on her left, a foot off, and didn’t touch her, and didn’t ask, and at the edge of the concrete he peeled off and went to find his brothers, and she stood there with an empty plate and watched him go and thought, oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.

He asked her at ten.

“No.”

“All right.”

That was the whole of it. He went and danced with Giana, who stood on his boots.

He asked her at eleven, when Remi had lost the dance contest for the fifth year running and was taking it badly at the beer trough.

“Still no.”

“Still all right,” he said, and went and danced with Ainsley, who didn’t stand on his boots, and then with Delia Voss, who’d asked him and was seventy and held on, and Sunny watched all three of them and told herself she was watching the floor, and the floor had a man on it.

Pearl watched her watch. Pearl had watched all of it, from the elbow onward: Ryder handled kindly, Brody’s beer refused, Knox laughed at, Pruitt apologized to, the plate taken, two dances refused. She’d been at the pie table when Sunny said no the second time and she’d looked down the length of the pavilion at Sunny with an expression Sunny had seen before, on the faces of team bosses who’d just figured out how a season was going to go and weren’t going to say so till it had.

The band said last song.

It was a slow one. It was always a slow one, apparently; Chase said so, going past her to drag Remi off the beer trough and onto the floor whether she liked it or not. The floor filled. Dean had come back for it, from taking Lara home, and stood at the edge with his hat off because his wife wasn’t there to dance with and he wasn’t going to dance with anybody else. Mason and Lauren. Owen and Olivia, and Sunny watched Olivia put her face in Owen’s neck and Owen’s hand go flat on her back, and looked away, because it was private even in public.

He didn’t ask.