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The bonfire was deep into the evening when I moved through the area with my cup in my hand. Woodsmoke hung low over the gravel and the cold came up through my boots from the frozen ruts. The fire pit threw orange light across every face it reached, and it reached most of them.

My lemonade had gone warm. I drank it anyway. The sugar sat thick on my teeth. Behind me, someone laughed. Ahead of me, Freak was already mid-performance.

He stood by the grill with one hand on his right shoulder. The sling had been gone for months. The scar was still pink but he’d stopped showing it to people unless they asked, which meant he’d found something better.

“The woman,” he was saying, “the actual woman, looks at this hole in my shoulder, this hole with my blood coming out of it, and she says to me…” He paused. The crowd around him leaned in. They’d heard this. I’d heard this. He’d refined it over months. Made it tighter. Changed the pacing. The punchline hadn’t changed because the punchline was me.

“She says, ‘Hold still.’” He delivered it deadpan. The same delivery I use when I’m irrigating a wound and the patient was making jokes about it. “Not ‘you’ll be okay.’ Not ‘this might hurt.’ ‘Hold still.’ Like I was a dog on a table.”

The crowd laughed. Freak watched me. I didn’t laugh. I’d never laughed. That was still the funniest part to everyone watching him watch me not laugh.

I took another sip of warm lemonade. The scar on my left flank pulled when I shifted my weight. Three months old. Clean. Dread’s sutures had come out neat. I still caught myself pressing a hand to it sometimes when the weather changed.

Tessa was ten feet away. She’d arrived with the easy confidence of someone who no longer checked whether she was welcome, which meant she’d been coming to these for a while now. I hadn’t noticed when that started. She was narrating something to Marianna at a volume that carried across half the compound.

“… and then he says, and I swear to God, he says…”

Marianna wasn’t listening to the words. Her large brown eyes were fixed on Tessa’s face with the attention of someone who found the performance more interesting than the content. When she saw me, her hand came out. No preamble. Just reached across the gap between us and took mine.

I shifted my cup to my left hand without breaking stride. Marianna’s fingers were cool. Dry. Certain, uncomplicated, the grip of someone who had decided you were safe and saw no reason to announce it.

“Hi,” I said.

“Maren.” She said my name the way she said everyone’s. Anchoring, deliberate, as though making sure it was still there. Then she went back to watching Tessa, our hands still linked.

Lark’s baby made the circuit of the fire pit. Passed arm to arm. A boy. Eight months old. Roulette had named him Dean, which nobody had expected and everyone had accepted because that was how names worked here. When he reached me, I let go of the hand I’d been holding to take him.

I adjusted my grip once. Cradled his head. His weight settled against my chest. He smelled like sunscreen and whatever the person before me had been drinking. He looked at me with the complete indifference of someone who had no opinion about my face or my hands or the fact that I had sewn up his father’s friend.

Babies were honest that way.

He stayed for thirty seconds. Then his face did something. I handed him to the next set of arms before the sound started. The transition took no effort at all. Nobody thanked me. Nobody needed to.

Stitch held court on top of a large red cooler at the edge of the pit. One eye on Biscuit.

Biscuit had been circling the cooler for twenty minutes. Dread’s dog moved at his own pace, nose down, tracking scents that existed for him and no one else. Every third circuit he paused. Looked up at Stitch. Stitch looked back. Neither committed. A cold war with no clear end state. It could last all night or end in three seconds depending on which of them got bored first.

I moved past them. My cup was empty. I didn’t refill it. The evening was cold enough that everybody had drifted toward the fire without deciding to. January in Missouri, when the sky goes dark at five and nobody admits they’re staying outside for the company.

I didn’t count anybody. Not the people at the fire, not the cars in the lot, not the hours until Monday.

The realization arrived somewhere between Freak’s second attempt at the punchline and Marianna letting go of my hand to reach for a cookie. I had been standing in the center of the compound for twenty minutes and I hadn’t once counted the distance to the nearest door. Hadn’t cataloged exits. Hadn’t noted who was armed and who wasn’t. Hadn’t done any of the things I’d done the first time I came here, when the fence felt like something that kept people in as much as it kept things out.

The gate was there. Leo stood beside it with a beer in his hand, talking to someone I didn’t recognize. The cameras were on their poles. The rotation was running. I knew that because Patch knew that, and Patch was standing by the fire pit with Fox, both of them with bottles in hand, both of them doing the not-talking that men did when they’d said everything that needed saying hours ago.

I was in it. Not watching it. That was the whole difference and I’d been at this party an hour before I noticed it, which is how I knew it was true. The things you notice are the things you’re still checking.

Someone handed me a fresh cup. I took it without looking to see who. The ice clicked. Cold this time. I drank. The sugar hit the same. My teeth didn’t care.

I finished the cup. Set it on the nearest flat surface. The night was just getting started.

* * *

The formal part of the night assembled itself without announcement. Fox moved to the center of the gathering and the crowd oriented toward him the way crowds did when someone with authority stops moving. Conversations died mid-sentence. Bottles found hands. Bodies shifted on coolers and folding chairs until everyone was facing the same direction, and the direction was Fox.

He stood with his feet planted, and the President’s patch caught the firelight and held it. He didn’t raise his hands.

Leo stood at the front. Twenty-one months of prospecting lived in the set of his jaw and the careful stillness of his hands. His Prospect patch was clean. He’d pressed it that morning. I could see the crease lines.