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At lunch I sat on the bench outside the barn doors with a sandwich and scrolled through the festival page on my phone. They were the same photos that had made me write a whole paper about him. Pumpkins taller than the courthouse windows. A hay wagon spilling painted gourds onto the grass.

Every one of them had been taken in daylight.

Harper had told me the festival ran until ten at night, with hayrides and a bluegrass band on the courthouse steps. I scrolled back through two years of photos and couldn’t find a single one taken after sundown. His work stood on that lawn in the dark while the biggest crowds of the weekend walked right past it.

Nobody expects a pumpkin to last.

I’d been thinking about that ever since he said it. I hadn’t been able to stop. He made these beautiful things. Then he let them disappear, and he acted like that was fine. And every night of the festival, they disappeared a little early.

That night I sat cross-legged on my bed with my sketchbook and drew a pumpkin. Then I drew it again with holes in it. Hundreds of small cutouts, some round and some shaped like leaves. I drew a light inside it. Then I drew what that light would throw across the grass and the people standing in it, so that after dark the pumpkin would be the brightest thing on the lawn.

I didn’t stop until almost one. I couldn’t have if I’d wanted to.

In the morning I tore the page out of my sketchbook and carried it downstairs. My heart was pounding.

“I had an idea,” I said. “You can totally say no. It’s just something I was thinking about, because the festival goes so late and none of the pictures are at night. I thought, what if one of them could glow? But it’s probably not practical, and I don’t know anything about wiring, so⁠—”

He held out his hand.

I gave him the page.

He looked at it for a long time. Long enough that I started counting my own heartbeats. He tilted it toward the window, and I watched his eyes move over the cutouts and the light on the grass. His thumb moved across the page slowly, following the pattern.

Then he grunted, handed it back, and climbed the ladder.

“Just an idea!” I said brightly to his back.

I folded the page in half and tucked it into the back of my sketchbook. My eyes stung, and I was furious with them for it.

I knew that look. I’d gotten it my whole life. It said my idea was sweet and somebody had real work to do.

I mixed paste for the rest of the morning and hummed so he wouldn’t know I minded.

“Hazel! Get in here.”

Harper was waving at me through the bakery window. I’d come into town for paint and masking tape, and I was walking back from the hardware store with a bag in each hand.

Twenty minutes later I was sitting at her counter with my bags at my feet and a cinnamon roll she refused to let me pay for.

“So,” she said, leaning on the counter while I ate it. “How’s life above the grump’s shop?”

“Quiet.”

“I bet.” She raised her eyebrows. “You know half the town wants to know what it’s like up there.”

“It’s sanding. Lots and lots of sanding.” I licked icing off my thumb. “He told me you save your newspapers for him. For the strips.”

“Every Tuesday. I stack it by the register for him.” She grinned. “He told you that? Shepherd told you something?”

“He tells me things. Short things.”

“Hazel.” She put her hand on her chest. “That’s more than any of us have gotten in four years.”

I laughed, and something in me that had been tight since my sketch relaxed a little. I’d been so busy proving myself on the mountain that I hadn’t noticed how much I’d missed having a friend.

“Listen,” Harper said. “The festival committee meets Tuesday night at the community center. You should come. We could use somebody under sixty with opinions.”

“I’d love to.”