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He makes a very good survey rod. Honestly, he makes a very good everything. The afternoon sun is on his shoulders, and his shirt is doing its usual thing, where every seam is hanging on for dear life. I take a lot longer than I need to with the clinometer.

“Are you done?” he asks.

“Almost.” I’m not even looking through it anymore. “Hold still. This is science.”

“Your science is staring at my butt.”

“Accurately measuring your butt,” I correct him, and he laughs.

He doesn’t laugh often. When he does, it starts low in his chest and rolls out over the valley, and I want to bottle it.

I make myself focus. I sketch in the deck, reaching out over the granite on steel footings, with a rail at adult height. Then I add a second rail, lower down at kid height, so the little ones can see the creek without somebody lifting them up.

Holt comes back and crouches beside me to look. He taps the lower rail with one huge finger. “Like that low fence rail.”

“Exactly. Somebody fixed it at kid height for Molly, and I stole the idea.” I bump his shoulder with mine. “I wonder who.”

He grunts, and his left ear doesn’t move a millimeter. He’s not even trying to deny it anymore.

“Move the bench,” he says.

“What’s wrong with the bench?”

“It faces the trail.” He turns my pencil around in my fingers and draws a new bench, set back against the rock, facing straight out at the valley. “The people who need to sit down still want the view. Maybe more than anyone.”

I look at his bench, and then I look at him. This big, gruff, green man thinks about the people who need to sit down, and my throat goes tight.

How did I get this lucky?

“Okay,” I say, and my voice comes out wobbly. “Bench moves.”

A pinecone bounces off the corner of my plans.

We both look up. The squirrel with the torn ear is sitting on a branch right above us, chattering like we owe it three months’ rent.

“Seriously?” I say to it. “This is a government document.”

The squirrel throws another pinecone, and this one lands right on my head.

“He doesn’t recognize county authority,” Holt says.

I rub my head. “That’s because he’s a menace.”

Holt’s mouth tips up. Then he takes the pencil out of my hand again, leans over the plans, and prints two words across the top in neat block capitals.

WREN’S LOOKOUT.

“No,” I say immediately. “Absolutely not. It’s Overlook Three.”

I cross it out and write OVERLOOK 3 underneath.

He takes the pencil back and writes WREN’S LOOKOUT again, bigger.

“Holt. You can’t name a public structure after a temporary officer.”

“It’s your design.”

“It’s a county plan. Prue will laugh at me.”