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I did it at five this morning, while Wren was still asleep, her face mashed into my pillow. I walked the boundary fence around to the bowl in silence, just as I always do. Nobody had been near it. The moths were tucked down in the moss where they belong, waiting for dark.

Nobody is getting near them. Not while I’m breathing.

By week eight, the whole town has gone a little bit crazy.

Wren wrote the closure notice herself and sent it over. The tourism office fixed the caption, just like Prue promised. It didn’t matter. Nobody reads captions. They just look at the pictures, and the pictures are of me, scowling at a gate, and Wren, purple-haired and laughing, with the sun in her lip ring.

Every bed-and-breakfast in Screaming Woods is booked solid for festival weekend. The bakery has started selling cookies shaped like tusks. The festival committee has doubled the number of food stalls and ordered a second porta-potty, which Brody tells me is the most exciting thing that’s happened to them in a decade.

Brody flies hay bales in for the festival stage, three at a time. After a dozen loads, his wings need a break.

And people want photos.

They wait for me outside the post office. They wave at my truck. A man in a fishing vest asks if he can get a picture of me “looking scary,” and I’m halfway to telling him where he can put his phone when Wren appears at my elbow.

“He only looks scary in the mornings,” she tells the man, with a huge smile. “Before coffee. Come back at seven tomorrow, and you’ll get the real deal.”

The man laughs and wanders off. Wren hooks her hand through my arm and steers me down the sidewalk.

“You were going to growl at him,” she says.

“I was going to growl at him.”

“You can’t growl at the tourists, big guy. They’re our visitor numbers.”

I let her steer me. I’d let her steer me off a cliff.

The last time strangers lined up for my face, they were screaming. Now they want selfies. I like being included, but I’m not a damn attraction. Not knowing what else to do, I just do what I always do: work.

Dale brings his little yellow digger to the old logging track at the start of week eight, right on schedule, and we build.

It’s hard, dirty, wonderful work. Dale digs, I haul, and Wren runs the entire operation, wearing a muddy hard hat two sizes too big for her.

Every person on that crew does exactly what she says, because she’s always right, and because she brings them donuts.

The hat keeps sliding down over her eyes. On the second morning, I take it off her head, pad the band with a strip of foam from my first-aid kit, and put it back on.

She pushes it up and blinks at me. “Did you just fix my hat?”

“It was falling off.”

“You fixed my hat!” She looks at me like I’ve handed her a diamond ring. “Ranger Ashford, that is the most romantic thing a man has ever done for me on a job site.”

Dale’s nephew, who runs the wheelbarrow, snorts. He’s about nineteen, and he’s been finding a lot of excuses to ask Wren questions about gravel.

I just look at him.

He finds somewhere else to be.

Wren elbows me in the ribs. “Professional,” she whispers.

“I was being professional. I didn’t growl.”

“Your face growled.”

My face can do what it likes. She’s mine.

By the end of week nine, the boardwalk posts are in. The wet section has a path of crushed stone. The kid-height rails at the creek crossing are bolted and sanded.