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“Didn’t lose.” He fixes my wig and helps me back into my costume. “You look good. Real good.”

“I look like a country music Q-tip.”

“You look like Dolly.” He kisses the side of my neck, under all that hair. “I’m not wearing the beard.”

“Fine. Grump. Fine.”

We’re forty minutes late to the party. The Kenny cowboy hat stays on my bedpost.

Saturday night, the station bay is full of hay bales and orange lights and a cooler of Martin’s apple cider. Half of Eden is in costume.

Martin and Nolene, Caleb’s parents, are dressed as each other, which is bizarre. Caleb came as Caleb, in a firefighter T-shirt, and when anybody asks, he says he’s dressed as a man who is always on duty.

Novak is a hot dog. Devin is a lifeguard, shirtless, with a whistle.

Rob, God bless him, is a sexy Smokey Bear, in a brown fur vest with no shirt underneath and a fire campaign hat, looking like a man with no regrets.

“Only you can prevent forest fires,” he tells me when I walk in. Then he tips his campaign hat at my wig. “Miss Parton. Big fan.”

“I picked his costume,” Cassia tells me, glowing. “He lost a bet.”

“What bet?”

“The kind I can’t talk about at work.”

Rob the bear blushes. Travis says he’s never letting him live it down.

Martin makes a toast with his cider to the B crew. A random person turns up the music, and Rob pulls Cassia out into the middle of the bay and dances with her, badly.

I look across the bay at Travis. He’s in his lumberjack costume, jeans and his flannel with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, leaning against Engine 1 with his arms crossed, watching Rob and Cassia dance with a look on his face I’ve never seen before—quiet and happy and a little bit stunned, like a man who just watched his little brother grow up.

Then his gaze meets mine and he doesn’t look away.

There it is again. The thing I carried home across the dark lot the night of the gathering and have been carrying ever since, tucked in my chest like a seed. It isn’t a seed anymore.

It’s a sunflower. Tall and bright and turned straight toward him.

I love you, I think, across the station bay, across the hay bales and the hot dog and the shirtless lifeguard.

I love you, you big quiet man.

I don’t say it. Not here, in a fire station with Rob in a fur vest.

But I think he hears it anyway. Because the corner of his mouth slowly tips up, and he crosses the bay to me without saying a word and takes my hand and doesn’t let go of it for the rest of the night.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Monday evening I make the call. “Is this Marisol Alvarez?”

There’s a pause on the line. Lindsey is sitting next to me on her couch with her hand on my knee. I’ve been staring at this number in my phone for six years.

“Yes,” a woman’s voice says. The tone is wary. “Who is this?”

“My name is Travis Raines, ma’am.” I clear my throat. There’s a lot of gravel in it. “I served with Joey. I was his squad leader in Kandahar.”

Nothing comes back for so long I think she’s hung up.

“Sarge,” she says.