Tangled Up in Christmas Lights

• Chapter 1 Turf Wars and Twinkle Lights
• Chapter 2 The Contract of the Season
• Chapter 3 One Basket, Two Grinches
• Chapter 4 High Altitude Hostility
• Chapter 5 Tangled Cords and Crossed Wires
• Chapter 6 The Evergreen Giant
• Chapter 7 A Hundred Feet Above Ground Zero
• Chapter 8 Coffee Spills and Blown Fuses
• Chapter 9 Swaying in the North Wind
• Chapter 10 The Ground Crew's Bets
• Chapter 11 Unraveling the Frustration
• Chapter 12 Shared Thermoses and Silent Truces
• Chapter 13 The Midnight Blackout
• Chapter 14 Secrets in the Subzero
• Chapter 15 A Sudden Drop
• Chapter 16 Frost on the Glass
• Chapter 17 Shifting Perspectives
• Chapter 18 Caught in the Net
• Chapter 19 Competing Spark to Warm Embers
• Chapter 20 The Star at the Summit
• Chapter 21 The Night Before the Switch
• Chapter 22 Short Circuits
• Chapter 23 The Town Square Gathering
• Chapter 24 Illumination
• Chapter 25 Unspooled Hearts
• Chapter 26 Shining Bright Together

The November wind in Holly Falls carried the distinct scent of frozen pine needles, woodsmoke, and impending retail frenzy. Nora Kelly stood in the bed of her Ford F-250, double-checking the tension on three heavy-duty spools of commercial-grade C9 ceramic bulbs. The temperature was hovering around twenty-eight degrees, cold enough to turn her breath into plumes of white exhaust, but not cold enough to numb her fingers through her goatskin work gloves. In her line of work, numbness was a liability; you couldn’t feel a cracked ceramic housing or a loose copper pin if your hands were frozen stiff.

Across Elm Street, an obnoxious, shiny cobalt-blue Ram 3500 rumbled into the curb, belching a cloud of diesel that ruined the crisp morning air. Nora didn't need to look at the custom vinyl lettering on the doors to know who it was, but she looked anyway, narrowing her eyes. Vance Holiday Illuminations: We Make Your Season Bright. The lettering was metallic gold, italicized, and twice as large as necessary.

Reid Vance hopped out of the cab, already grinning like a man who had personally invented the concept of festivity. He was wearing an absurdly pristine shearling-lined canvas coat, thick duck boots, and a red wool beanie perched just so on his thick, dark hair. He carried an aluminum ladder with one arm like it weighed nothing, tucking it under his shoulder before flashing a wave across the asphalt.

"Morning, Kelly!" he called out, his voice cutting through the quiet hum of early morning traffic. "Careful with those staples today. Heard the humidity might rust out your vintage gear before December even hits."

Nora stepped down onto the tailgate and dropped to the pavement, her steel-toed boots hitting the ground with a solid thud. "These are heavy-gauge galvanized clips, Vance, not desk staples. Some of us actually care about the homeowners' soffits instead of just gluing cheap LEDs to their gutter guards."

"Hey, it’s marine-grade adhesive tape," Reid replied, crossing the centerline of the two-lane street with casual ease, leaving his ladder leaning safely against a front hedge. "And it saves thirty minutes per roofline. Time is money, Nora. You're still out here winding your wire like it’s 1985."

"At least when my clients turn on their displays, their circuit breakers don't look like Fourth of July fireworks," she said, leaning against her truck’s quarter panel and crossing her arms. "Mrs. Higgins told me you tripped her master panel three times last Thanksgiving."

Reid stopped on the opposite curb, hands buried in his pockets, rock back on his heels. "Mrs. Higgins tried to plug a six-foot motorized reindeer into an indoor power strip that was already running a space heater. That wasn't an installation flaw. That was user error. My transformers were completely rated for the draw."

"Uh-huh. Tell that to the fire department."

"The chief gave me a warning, not a ticket," Reid said, the corners of his mouth twitching with amusement. "And besides, she invited me back this year. Double the yardage. I'm doing the roof ridge, the dormers, and wrapping the three weeping willows in warm-white mini-lights."

Nora’s spine stiffened. "The willows? Those were my willows. I’ve done the Higgins property since my dad handed me the business."

"Well, your dad was reasonable about pricing. You charge like you're hand-crafting every diode out of solid gold." Reid gestured toward the two-story colonial home behind him, where Mrs. Higgins was currently peeking through the lace curtains of her front bay window. "She wanted the full winter wonderland package, Nora. You only offered the traditional eave accent."

"Because weeping willows look like giant tangled spiderwebs if you wrap them in warm-white without balancing the trunk lumens!" Nora snapped, taking a half-step forward before catching herself. She adjusted her tool belt, the heavy clinking of pliers, zip-ties, and a digital multimeter grounding her back in reality. "It’s about aesthetic discipline. You just throw every bulb in your inventory at a structure until the power grid groans."

"The people want bright, Kelly. Nobody ever looked at a Christmas display and thought, 'Gosh, I wish there was more negative space.'"

"Some people appreciate negative space. It’s called class."

"It's called running out of wire," Reid shot back.

They glared at each other across the strip of slushy asphalt that divided the north side of Elm Street from the south side. This had been the rhythm of their autumns for five years straight, ever since Nora took over Kelly’s Custom Illumination after her father retired to Florida, and Reid launched his own outfit after five years working commercial rigging in Chicago. Nora represented heritage, meticulous planning, and hand-soldered connections; Reid represented speed, sheer wattage, and modern logistics. Holly Falls was a prosperous town that took its municipal and residential decorations with deadly seriousness, which meant there was plenty of money to be made, but never enough peace of mind to share.

A loud honk shattered the standoff. Both turned to see a municipal sedan—a beige cruiser with the Holly Falls crest emblazoned on the door—idling five yards away. Mayor Arthur Sterling rolled down his window, his breath pluming out into the cold. His silver hair was neatly combed beneath a fur-lined cap, and he looked thoroughly exhausted for eight in the morning.

"Reid! Nora!" Sterling barked over the rattle of the car's engine. "Can you two pause the border dispute for five seconds?"

Nora straightened up, plastering on her most professional small-business-owner smile. "Good morning, Mayor Sterling. Just discussing the finer points of ambient exterior lighting with the competition."

"More like declaring war on my margins," Reid muttered under his breath, though he too smiled smoothly at the mayor. "What can we do for you, Arthur? Early permit check?"

Sterling waved a gloved hand dismissively. "Forget the permits. I need you both down at Town Hall. Ten o'clock sharp."

Nora frowned, glancing at her watch and then at her truck bed full of neatly sorted tubs. "Mayor, I have three residential installations lined up before noon. Elm Street, then the maple trees over on Oakwood."

"And I’ve got fifty feet of garland waiting to be hoisted across the dry cleaner's facade," Reid added, leaning his forearm on the driver's side frame of Sterling's car. "What's going on?"

"The Great Spruce is what's going on," Mayor Sterling said flatly.

Nora's breath hitched. Reid froze.

The Great Spruce was the centerpiece of the Holly Falls Winter Jubilee. It was an ancient, towering Norway spruce that stood smack in the middle of Town Square, soaring over ninety feet into the air. Decorating it was the single most prestigious, most lucrative contract in the county. For the past twenty years, it had been handled exclusively by a specialty firm from out of state, an operation run by a pair of brothers who charged an exorbitant sum and brought in crane trucks the size of city buses.

"What about it?" Reid asked, his tone suddenly dropping the playful edge. "Did the Miller Brothers pull out?"

"They went out of business in September," Sterling said, clearly annoyed that he had to explain municipal drama on the side of the road. "Declared bankruptcy. Sold off their fleet. The Town Council was supposed to find a replacement by October, but the procurement committee sat on their hands, and now the Festival of Lights is three weeks away and the tree is completely bare."

Nora took a deliberate step toward the car. "Mayor, Kelly’s Custom Illumination can handle it. I have the commercial liability policy, I have the climbing certifications, and my dad helped rig that tree back in the nineties before the Millers took it over."

"Hold on," Reid cut in, stepping directly in front of her. "Your dad used ropes and climbing spurs, which nearly killed the bark on the eastern side. I have the heavy-duty rigging gear, the high-voltage distribution hubs, and the crew capacity to work a round-the-clock rotation. Vance Holiday Illuminations is built for industrial-scale jobs."

"You don't even own a bucket truck tall enough to clear the mid-canopy, Reid!" Nora argued, stepping around him to look Sterling in the eye. "You’d be using extension poles and a prayer!"

"I can rent whatever I need!"

"Quiet! Both of you!" Mayor Sterling raised his voice, slamming his flat hand against the steering wheel. The sudden sharp crack of sound echoed down the quiet street, causing Mrs. Higgins’s lace curtains to twitch violently. "I don't have time for the usual Kelly-Vance blood feud. The Town Council is meeting at ten. We are discussing the contract. If you want a shot at it, be in the council chambers. If not, I’ll call a firm out of Minneapolis and pay double for the emergency travel fee."

Sterling didn't wait for an answer. He rolled up his window, shifted the sedan into gear, and drove away, leaving a faint cloud of road salt and exhaust swirling between them.

The silence that followed was heavy with instant calculation.

Nora looked back at Reid. His easygoing smirk was completely gone, replaced by the sharp, analytical expression she hated because it meant he was actually taking something seriously. Reid was a menace when he was joking around; when he was focused, he was infuriatingly competent.

"Ninety feet," Reid murmured, looking past her toward the direction of Town Square. "That's roughly fifteen thousand individual points of light if you wrap the inner boughs properly."

"Twenty thousand if you want it to look full from the highway," Nora corrected automatically. "You can't just drape the outer perimeter. The Norway spruce has deep tiering. If you don't anchor the light strings along the main lateral branches, the whole thing sags after the first heavy snowfall."

Reid looked at her, his eyes narrowing. "You've mapped it."

"I've lived here my entire life, Vance. I’ve looked at that tree every December since I was four years old." She turned back toward her truck and yanked a heavy plastic storage bin toward the tailgate with unnecessary force. "See you at ten o'clock. Don't be late. Municipal clocks run on real time, not your 'I'll get to it after my third macchiato' time."

"Hey, I drink black coffee," Reid shouted after her as she climbed back into the bed of her truck. "And I'm going to win that bid, Kelly! Prepare yourself to look up at my work all month long!"

"I'd rather stare directly into a strobe light!" she shouted back, refusing to turn around.

She heard his heavy footsteps crunch back across the street, the solid slam of the Ram's door, and the deep, throaty roar of his modified diesel engine as he tore away from the curb. Nora took a deep, steadying breath, letting the icy air sting the inside of her lungs.

A contract for the Great Spruce would change everything.

Kelly’s Custom Illumination was solid, but it was scraping by. Her father had left her a sterling reputation and a warehouse full of meticulously maintained equipment, but he had also left her with outdated marketing, old debts, and a loyal base of elderly clients who expected 1998 prices in the middle of a historic supply-chain crunch. Over the past three years, Reid Vance had been steadily encroaching on her territory, chipping away at the high-end residential estates out on the ridge and scooping up the commercial strip malls along the bypass. He had modern branding, digital design mock-ups on iPads, and a fast, flashy approach that appealed to the newer, wealthier families moving into the subdivision developments.

If Nora landed the municipal tree, the check from the city would clear her truck payments for the year, allow her to upgrade her entire inventory to energy-efficient commercial LEDs, and solidify her position as the premier lighting designer in the county. It was the kind of validation that couldn't be bought with glossy mailers or slick Instagram reels.

She spent the next hour working with furious efficiency on Elm Street, snapping precision clips onto the eaves of a modest Cape Cod house, barely aware of the sting in her fingertips. Her mind was three miles away, tracing the geometry of a ninety-foot spruce. She thought about wind loads. Holly Falls sat right at the mouth of a river valley; when the northern gusts came down from the Canadian border, the square acted as a natural wind tunnel. Cheap strings would snap like brittle twigs. The tension needed to be dispersed through high-tensile aircraft cable, with heavy-gauge strain reliefs at every connection point.

By nine-thirty, Nora was packed up. She climbed into the cab of her Ford, threw her leather work gloves onto the dashboard, and drove toward the town center.

Holly Falls looked like a postcard that was in the middle of a nervous breakdown. The storefronts on Main Street were caught halfway between Thanksgiving harvest displays and aggressive holiday merchandising. The local hardware store had plastic illuminated snowmen standing shoulder-to-shoulder with bags of rock salt and leaf blowers. In the center of it all, rising like a dark green colossus against the pale gray sky, stood the Great Spruce.

Nora slowed down as she circled the square. The tree really was magnificent. It had stood in the park long before the town hall was built, surviving blizzards, lightning strikes, and decades of amateur civic planning. Its lower branches swept wide, creating a sheltered cavern beneath the skirt of the canopy that smelled intensely of sap and damp earth. But the upper third was the real challenge. Above sixty feet, the trunk tapered rapidly, and the lateral branches became thinner, more flexible, and completely exposed to the open wind.

Parked near the monument base, idling arrogantly in a reserved municipal spot, was the cobalt-blue Ram.

Nora gritted her teeth, found a spot two blocks away, parallel-parked with sharp precision, and grabbed her portfolio binder from the passenger seat. Inside the thick black leather folder were laminated spec sheets, copies of her master electrician license, her commercial insurance rider, and the hand-drawn rigging diagrams her father had made twenty-five years ago, updated with modern load calculations in her own neat, tight handwriting.

She marched through the double doors of Town Hall, her boots squeaking loudly on the freshly waxed linoleum. The building smelled of old paper, floor polish, and bad municipal coffee. Nora took the stairs two at a time up to the second floor, pushing through the heavy wooden doors of the council chambers.

The room was already warm, heated by ancient cast-iron radiators that hissed and clanked under the tall arched windows. Mayor Sterling sat at the center of the semicircular oak desk, flanked by Councilwoman Evelyn Cho, who ran the historical society, and Councilman Gary Gable, a retired contractor who perpetually looked like he was smelling sour milk.

Sitting in the front row of the gallery chairs, slouched back with one ankle resting on the opposite knee, was Reid Vance. He had ditched his canvas work coat, revealing a charcoal-gray wool sweater that made him look remarkably like someone who belonged in an architectural digest rather than the bed of a pickup truck. He had a sleek, slim leather tablet case balanced on his leg.

"Ah, Nora," Mayor Sterling said, looking up from a stack of manila folders. "Good. You’re both here. Take a seat."

Nora didn't sit in the row with Reid. She walked down the center aisle, her posture rigid, and pulled out a chair three seats down from him, setting her heavy binder onto the polished wooden armrest with a deliberate clatter.

"Nice binder," Reid murmured, not looking at her. "Did it come with a Trapper Keeper?"

"It contains five years of certified wind-load data," she whispered back tightly. "Did your tablet come with an app that prevents you from dropping twenty grand worth of lights in a forty-mile-per-hour gust?"

"Kids," Councilwoman Cho said, tapping a pen against her water glass. "Please. We have forty minutes before the open public session, and we have a catastrophic problem."

"We understand the Millers defaulted," Nora said, turning her attention fully to the council. "I have my credentials right here. Kelly’s Custom Illumination is prepared to take on the municipal contract under the exact terms of the original RFP. We have the safety clearance, the wiring expertise, and the local roots."

"Vance Holiday Illuminations can beat the Millers' completion time by four days," Reid interrupted smoothly, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the wooden rail in front of him. "I already have a supplier in Duluth holding twelve cases of high-output commercial strings on reserve. I can have the ground grid laid out by Friday afternoon."

"Speed doesn't matter if your anchors pull loose during the opening ceremony, Reid," Nora retorted.

"My anchors don't pull loose, Nora. I use dynamic tensioning. It flexes with the timber."

"Dynamic tensioning on a Norway spruce? The wood is too soft in the upper third! You’ll core out the cambium layer if you use mechanical cams!"

"I'm not using mechanical cams, I'm using non-invasive nylon sling collars—"

"Enough!" Councilman Gable slammed a thick, calloused palm onto the council desk. The sound cut through the arguments instantly. Gable leaned forward, his heavy brows drawn together. "We don't care about your slings or your cams or your cambium layers. What we care about is the calendar, the budget, and the rental yard."

Nora blinked. "The rental yard?"

Mayor Sterling sighed, running a hand over his face. "The Miller Brothers used their own specialized eighty-five-foot boom truck. When their company was liquidated, that truck was shipped to a buyer in Cincinnati. It’s gone."

"So rent an articulated boom," Reid said, waving a hand casually. "United Rentals has half a dozen sixty-footers down in the depot."

"The spruce is ninety-two feet tall, Reid," Gable growled. "A sixty-footer doesn't cut it. You can't reach the crown, and the council isn't going to let anyone free-climb forty feet above the basket with a tool belt and twenty pounds of cabling in subzero weather. Not on the town’s liability policy."

"Then get a hundred-footer," Nora said logically. "There are aerial platforms that clear a hundred and twenty feet easily."

"There is exactly one four-wheel-drive rough-terrain articulated cherry picker with a ninety-five-foot working height available for rent within two hundred miles of Holly Falls," Sterling said, reading directly from a sheet of paper in front of him. "It’s sitting in a commercial yard across the state line in Superior."

Reid shrugged. "So book it. Pay the freight fee."

"We did book it," Sterling said. "The town paid the reserve deposit this morning."

Nora let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. "Okay. Well, that solves the access issue. So let's talk about the installation contract. If Kelly’s is awarded the bid—"

"The rental cost for that machine," Gable interrupted, his voice dropping into a harsh gravelly register, "is three times the budget we allocated for equipment. Three times. Because of the last-minute reservation, the holiday demand, and the transport permits."

A cold, uneasy feeling began to settle in the pit of Nora’s stomach. She looked at Sterling, then at Gable, then over at Reid, whose relaxed posture had completely vanished. Reid was sitting up straight, his jaw tightening as he too began to smell the bureaucratic trap closing around them.

"What are you saying, Arthur?" Reid asked carefully.

Mayor Sterling folded his hands together on top of the desk. "I'm saying the town’s remaining budget for the Great Spruce cannot cover the machine rental and a single private contract at your standard commercial rates. The numbers don't work. We either cancel the tree lighting for the first time in sixty-four years, or we pool the resources."

"Pool the resources?" Nora repeated, her voice cracking slightly on the second word.

"The town will supply the machine," Councilwoman Cho said, smiling with the kind of pleasant, implacable cheerfulness that only small-town civic leaders could muster. "The town will cover the fuel, the transport, and the municipal insurance waiver. In exchange, the installation fee will be split evenly between your two companies."

Nora shot up out of her chair, her binder nearly sliding to the floor. "Split? With him?"

"Wait a second," Reid said, standing up as well, his voice rising in disbelief. "You want us to co-contract? That’s impossible. We run completely different systems. Our voltages, our layouts, our crews—it’s like mixing oil and water."

"Then you'd better learn how to make an emulsion, Mr. Vance," Gable said bluntly. "Because here's the reality: neither of you has the manpower to get twenty thousand lights on that monster in ten days alone. Not with the weather coming in next week. And neither of you has the capital to rent that cherry picker on your own nickel without bankrupting your small businesses."

"I have a crew," Nora insisted, though her mind raced through her actual ledger: two college kids on winter break and her cousin who was terrified of heights over twenty feet.

"Your crew consists of temp labor and your uncle’s stepson, Nora," Gable said, entirely unmoved. "And Reid, your guys are already spread thin doing every strip mall from here to the interstate. You both need each other's equipment, and you both need this machine. More importantly, the town needs this done without an international incident."

"We can't work together," Nora said, her hands trembling slightly with pure frustration. "He cuts corners! He uses plastic zip-ties that freeze and snap in negative ten! He doesn't respect the load balance!"

"I don't cut corners!" Reid shouted, stepping out into the aisle, towering over her as he defended his honor. "I use high-density UV-resistant fasteners rated for industrial arctic conditions, Kelly! And you take so long wrapping a single branch that the tree grows another two inches before you finish!"

"Hey!" Sterling slammed the desk again, this time standing up to face them. "Enough! You want the job? It’s a joint contract. Fifty-fifty split on the gross payout. You share the equipment. You share the machine. You split the labor. If you don't want it, say the word right now, and I’ll walk into the council meeting and announce that Holly Falls will have a dark square for Christmas because our two best professionals couldn't stop acting like toddlers in a sandbox."

The chambers fell deathly quiet, save for the steady clanking of the steam radiator by the window.

Nora stared at Sterling, her chest heaving. The payout. Even split fifty-fifty, the municipal contract was huge. It was enough to cover her overhead, pay off the balance on her new hydraulic line puller, and keep her company completely solvent through the slow months of January and February. But worse than the money was the thought of walking away. If she backed out, Reid might find a way to finance the machine himself, take the glory, and hold it over her head for the rest of their natural lives.

She glanced sideways at Reid.

He was staring at the floor, his jaw working as he ran the numbers through his head. He was proud, he was cocky, and he was stubborn as an old pine stump, but he wasn't an idiot. He knew the math didn't lie. Without this machine, neither of them was touching the Great Spruce.

"The cherry picker," Reid said slowly, looking up at Sterling. "It’s a single-basket boom?"

Gable nodded. "Two-man heavy-duty commercial basket. Eight-hundred-pound capacity. Dual control stations—one on the deck, one in the bucket."

Nora’s stomach plummeted into her boots. "A two-man basket? We’re supposed to work out of the same bucket?"

"You're not going to string ninety feet of spruce with one person in the air, Nora," Gable said flatly. "One feeds the line, one sets the clips. That's how the Millers did it. That's how it has to be done if you want to beat the blizzard that’s forecast for the end of next week."

"We will kill each other," Nora stated plainly. "We won't even make it forty feet up. One of us will push the other out."

"Then we’ll charge the survivor with manslaughter and hire someone from Duluth," Gable replied without missing a beat. "Do you want the contract or not?"

Nora looked at Reid. Reid looked at Nora.

For a long, agonizing moment, neither spoke. Nora saw the tight line of his lips, the sudden flicker of pure, unadulterated exasperation in his dark eyes. He hated this just as much as she did. He despised her precision just as much as she despised his haste. They had built their entire professional identities in this town as the antithesis of one another: the traditionalist versus the modernist, the meticulous craftswoman versus the high-speed entrepreneur.

"Half the payout," Reid said, his voice flat, emotionless.

"Half the payout," Sterling confirmed. "Direct deposit upon final inspection and the lighting ceremony switch-on."

"I want design authority on the electrical schematics," Nora demanded, pointing a finger at Reid. "I’m not risking a cascade failure because you under-gauged the main drop cables."

"Fine," Reid snapped, turning his glare onto her. "And I want control of the staging and the hoist schedule. I'm not sitting up in a frozen bucket waiting for you to hand-tie bows on every individual evergreen cluster. We move fast, we work clean, and we stay on schedule."

"I don't tie bows, Vance!"

"You know what I mean!"

"Do we have a deal?" Sterling asked, holding up a single document with two signature lines already printed at the bottom.

Nora looked at the paper. It looked less like a contract and more like a mutual suicide pact. But the alternative was defeat. The alternative was conceding the square, admitting she couldn't handle the scale, and watching her business slowly wither while Reid continued his slow, glossy conquest of the county.

"Give me the pen," Nora said, her voice like iron.

Reid reached out, snatched the pen from Sterling's hand before she could grab it, and scrawled his name across the first line with broad, aggressive strokes. He tossed the pen onto the desk, where it rolled toward her, leaving a small smear of blue ink on the oak.

"All yours, partner," Reid said, the word dripping with enough sarcasm to frost the windows.

Nora picked up the pen, clicked it once, and pressed the tip down hard enough to indent the three carbon copies beneath the top page. She wrote Nora Kelly, Owner, Kelly’s Custom Illumination, making sure her signature was perfectly level, sharp, and twice as legible as his.

"The machine arrives tomorrow morning at seven," Mayor Sterling said, visibly relieved as he pulled the document back across the desk. "The lights are delivered to the Town Hall maintenance shed by eight. God help Holly Falls."

"Don't worry, Arthur," Reid said, pulling his leather tablet case under his arm and turning toward the exit. "We’re going to give you a show. Assuming Kelly doesn't get vertigo."

Nora didn't even look at him as he walked past her. "The only thing that makes me sick, Reid, is your diesel exhaust."

He let out a short, dry laugh, pushed through the heavy council chamber doors, and let them swing shut behind him, the brass hinges groaning in the drafty hall. Nora remained standing in front of the council desk, her gloves balled tightly in her fists, staring out the tall arched windows at the towering dark green silhouette of the Great Spruce.

Ninety feet of timber, thirty thousand square feet of lateral boughs, two hundred and forty volts of live current, and Reid Vance standing six inches away from her in an aerial steel cage.

The holiday season had officially begun.

The ink on the tripartite agreement between the Municipality of Holly Falls, Kelly’s Custom Illumination, and Vance Holiday Illuminations was barely dry when the logistical nightmare made itself known. Nora sat behind the scratched laminate desk in her shop, a converted carriage house behind her home on Maple Street, staring at the municipal procurement manifest. Outside, the early dusk had already painted the sky a bruised purple, and the ambient temperature was sliding toward twenty-four degrees.

Across town, Reid Vance was undoubtedly calculating how many social media posts he could milk out of an eighty-foot aerial lift, but Nora was concerned with math that involved less dopamine and far more amperage. A municipal tree was not an upscale suburban gambit. A resident on the ridge could accept a flickering bulb behind an evergreen bough; if three strings went cold on the Great Spruce on opening night, the local paper would print it on page two above the police blotter, and every amateur electrician in three counties would dissect the failure on Facebook.

The contract sat between two ceramic mugs of black tea. It was twelve pages long, single-spaced, typed on legal-size parchment that smelled faintly of the town hall basement archive. The document laid out three primary clauses that made Nora’s teeth grind. First: the joint contract awarded forty-two thousand dollars, split equally upon unanimous sign-off from the town council following the lighting ceremony on December first. Second: liquidated damages of five hundred dollars per day would be levied against both contractors for every twenty-four-hour period the display remained dark past the deadline. Third, and most offensive: the execution of the contract required continuous on-site presence of both principal license holders during all mechanical elevation operations.

That meant the bucket. If the boom moved, they both had to be in it. Councilman Gable had personally added that addendum in red ballpoint before they left the municipal chambers, murmuring something about "mutual skin in the game" and "ensuring nobody abandons the project to do residential driveways in Duluth."

A knock sounded on the carriage house side door, rattling the frosted glass pane. Nora didn’t bother looking up from her schematic. "Door's unlocked, Caleb. Grab the heat gun from the back bench if you’re heading back out."

The door swung inward, bringing with it a gust of sharp pine air, the rumble of a heavy-duty exhaust, and a pair of boots far heavier than Caleb’s worn running sneakers.

"Not Caleb," Reid said, shutting the heavy door with his hip. He was carrying a cardboard four-cup drink holder from the diner on Main Street, though it contained only two oversized paper cups, their plastic lids steaming in the cool shop air. "Though I’m flattered you thought your college intern had this kind of footfall."

Nora’s pen stopped mid-stroke above a line of calculation. She raised her chin slowly, looking him over with deliberate lack of enthusiasm. He was wearing his work vest now—a faded canvas Carhartt over a heavyweight flannel—and his dark hair had that static-charged, crushed look that came from yanking off a beanie in a hurry.

"How did you get past the gate?" she asked.

"Your gate latch has an ice jam in the keeper. You need to hit it with silicone spray, not WD-40. WD attracts grit." Reid set the cardboard tray down directly on top of her clear-span schematic for the lower branch distribution.

Nora slid the paper out from under the tray with two fingers, inspecting it for moisture rings before glaring up at him. "I know how to lubricate my own hardware, Vance. And this is private property. Trespassing on a competitor's workspace is typically grounds for voiding a partnership before it starts."

"We aren't competitors until December second at eight o'clock in the morning," Reid said smoothly, dropping into the ancient vinyl swivel chair across from her desk. The hydraulics sighed in defeat under his weight. "Right now, we are co-managing directors of Holly Falls Festive Disaster Prevention LLC. Drink the coffee, Kelly. It’s straight black, dark roast, no sugar. I know your palate."

Nora looked at the cup. The steam smelled rich, distinctly better than the instant grounds she had been reheating in the microwave since two in the afternoon. She left it sitting on the desk. "What do you want, Reid? I have forty residential rooflines to map by seven tomorrow morning."

"No, you don't," Reid said, leaning back and lacing his fingers over his chest. "You're doing what I've been doing since one o'clock: rescheduling every customer on your roster who isn't threatening litigation. Because if we don't start staging Town Square by dawn, that tree is going to swallow us whole."

He wasn't entirely wrong, which made it twice as irritating. Nora pushed her chair back an inch, keeping her hands flat on the desk. "I read the equipment manifest the council office couriered over. The cherry picker is a JLG 860SJ. Telescopic boom, eight-foot platform, dual fuel, four-wheel drive with oscillating axles."

"It's a beast," Reid agreed, his eyes narrowing slightly as he slipped into professional evaluation mode. "Ninety-one-foot working platform height. Fifty-six feet of horizontal outreach. That gives us enough swing to skirt the widest branches on the south perimeter without repositioning the chassis more than four times."

"If the turf holds," Nora countered immediately. "The park around the Great Spruce isn't reinforced asphalt, Reid. It's eighty-year-old sod over glacial till. That rig weighs thirty-eight thousand pounds dry. You drive that straight onto the lawn after a November thaw and you’ll sink the outriggers straight through the municipal irrigation lines. Gable will have our heads mounted on the community center wall."

Reid didn't argue. Instead, he pulled a folded piece of cardstock from his inner vest pocket and tossed it onto the desk between them. It opened to reveal a hand-drawn site layout, executed in blue drafting pen on heavy grid paper.

Nora looked down at it despite herself. The lines were remarkably straight, the scale notations precise. Reid had marked out the four primary set positions for the boom's footprint, complete with load-bearing calculations for three-inch oak timber mats under the tires.

"I called the lumber yard in Pine Ridge," Reid said, the casual arrogance in his voice tempered by the flat reality of the job. "They’re dropping twenty industrial crane mats at the south curb at six-thirty tomorrow. We build an access track across the lawn. We don't touch the grass. The weight stays dispersed across the roots."

Nora studied the layout. Her father had used railway ties twenty years ago, but modern timber mats were wider, heavier, and significantly safer for dynamic counterweights. She tapped her pencil against the corner of the grid. "Who pays for the mats?"

"Fifty-fifty," Reid said. "Six hundred bucks total. I already put my credit card down for the reserve."

She looked up at him, assessing the angle of his jaw, the faint shadow of dark stubble that seemed permanent by late afternoon. "You didn't ask me."

"You want to spend tomorrow morning digging an eighteen-ton hydraulic lift out of the town green with a backhoe? Because I don't. We either spend the six hundred on lumber, or we spend three grand replacing the parks department’s subterranean pop-up sprinklers."

Nora reached into her desk drawer, pulled out her company checkbook, and wrote a check for three hundred dollars to Vance Holiday Illuminations. She tore it along the perforation with a crisp, dry snap and slid it across the paper layout. "Don't ever commit my funds without clearance again. But the mats are the right call."

Reid picked up the check, folded it once, and tucked it into his pocket without looking at the amount. A faint, knowing smirk touched the corner of his mouth. "You always were a peach to work with, Nora."

"I am a licensed professional with an impeccable safety record," she said coolly. "You are an aggressive contractor who treats high-voltage current like holiday party confetti. Now, what’s the lighting plan? Cho said the town ordered commercial C9 LEDs from a catalog in Milwaukee."

"They did," Reid said, his face darkening slightly. "Twelve thousand ceramic-finish multi-colors for the main canopy, and eight thousand warm-white minis for the interior core."

Nora dropped her pencil. "Multi-colors?"

"Multi-colors."

"On the Great Spruce?" Her voice climbed half an octave. "The town tree has been classic warm-white with amber undertones for thirty years! It’s an iconic look! Multi-color looks like a used car lot in Kenosha!"

"Hey, take it up with the historical society," Reid said, holding his palms up defensively. "Councilwoman Cho decided that after the year the county had with the mill closure, Holly Falls needed 'nostalgic vibrancy.' Her words, not mine. Five-color mix: red, blue, green, amber, orange. Single-diode faceted covers, twelve-inch spacing on eighteen-gauge green wire."

Nora rested her forehead in her hands for three long seconds. Multi-color C9s were notoriously unforgiving. If a white strand had a slight voltage dip toward the end of a long run, the human eye barely noticed the shift in color temperature; it just looked a little softer. If a multi-color strand dropped half a volt, the blues turned purple, the greens went muddy, and the red looked like an angry, dying ember.

"The line drop," Nora muttered into her fingers. "The voltage drop over three hundred feet of eighteen-gauge is going to kill the top third of the tree. The colors will look completely washed out by the time we hit eighty feet."

"Not if we run a three-phase backbone," Reid said.

She lifted her head, eyeing him with fresh suspicion. "You want to run industrial three-phase up the trunk?"

"I’m saying we haul three heavy-duty twelve-gauge SJTW drop cords up the primary timber," Reid explained, leaning forward, his forearms resting on his knees. The easy, teasing banter was gone again, replaced by the mechanical competence that Nora found both reassuring and profoundly aggravating. "We break the tree into three distinct electrical zones: the skirt from ground to thirty feet; the mid-body from thirty to sixty; and the crown from sixty to the peak. Each zone gets its own isolated branch circuit driven by a twenty-amp distribution box mounted directly to the trunk on a neoprene-lined tension collar."

Nora stared at him, running the amperage through her head. Three zones. Twenty amps each. At one hundred and twenty volts, that gave them twenty-four hundred watts of head space per zone. The C9 LEDs drew roughly 0.8 watts per bulb. With twelve thousand bulbs, the total draw would be ninety-six hundred watts across the entire structure.

"We'd need a sixty-amp temporary service drop at the base," she murmured, her mind involuntarily connecting the dots. "The municipal pole by the bandstand only has two thirty-amp breakers."

"Gable is having the city utility crew pull a temporary hundred-amp disconnect off the transformer pole behind the gazebo tomorrow afternoon," Reid replied. He sounded almost smug, but there was an undercurrent of exhaustion in his eyes that matched her own. "I made that a condition of my signature before Sterling left the building."

Nora picked up the paper coffee cup. It was still hot enough to warm her palm through the cardboard sleeve. She took a sip. It was bitter, strong, and completely unpretentious. "Fine. That solves the power feed. What about the physical layout?"

"The Millers used the spiral method," Reid said.

"The spiral method is garbage," Nora said flatly, setting the cup down. "It’s lazy, it chokes the growth of the lower boughs, and it takes twice as much wire to cover the canopy depth. The lateral branches on a Norway spruce droop at the tips. If you wrap them in a spiral, the weight of the wire pulls the outer tips down, exposing the bare wood underneath. The first wet snow will drag the whole display down like an umbrella folding in on itself."

"Then what's your pitch, Kelly? The starburst?"

"The rib-and-finger," she said, tapping the center of her desk blotter. "We climb the trunk with the main vertical feeds along the four cardinal points. From those vertical spines, we run our secondary lines straight out along the primary lateral branches to the very tips, secure them with tension-release clips, and feather the light strings across the secondary growth. When the wind hits it, each branch moves independently. No tension transfer between tiers. If a gale comes out of the north, the tree sags naturally, but the wire doesn't bind."

Reid fell silent. He stared down at the floor, his brow furrowed as he visualized the rigging. Nora knew exactly what he was calculating: the hours. The rib-and-finger technique was twice as labor-intensive as a simple helical spiral. It meant reaching into the interior of the tree, maneuvering the heavy basket within inches of the brittle inner branches, and securing individual anchors rather than just tossing a spool around the perimeter from twenty feet away.

"It’ll take four full days in the air," Reid said quietly. "Assuming zero equipment failures and wind under fifteen knots."

"It’ll take four days if we work ten-hour shifts," Nora corrected. "And it will survive a northern blizzard. The spiral will fail the first time the temperature drops to single digits and the sleet glazes the needles. You know I'm right, Reid. Your dad's crews used to fix the Millers' broken spirals back when we were kids."

A shadow crossed Reid’s face at the mention of his father. Thomas Vance had been a master carpenter before he transitioned into high-altitude municipal rigging, a man who believed in structural redundancy above all things. He and Nora’s father had been fierce competitors forty years ago, trading the commercial contracts of Holly Falls back and forth like a pair of aging prizefighters.

"My dad used too much steel," Reid muttered, though the edge had left his voice. "He built displays like he was bracing a bridge deck."

"And not one of his installations ever came down," Nora pointed out.

Reid exhaled slowly, blowing a plume of air that stirred the corner of the layout paper on the desk. He stood up, towering over the small office, his broad frame instantly making the room feel two sizes smaller. He looked at the cluttered pegboard walls behind her, where rows of neatly coiled commercial cables hung like black licorice wreaths, organized strictly by length and wire gauge.

"Rib-and-finger it is," he said, turning toward the door. "But that means we need two line-feeders on the ground continuously. My guy Marcus and your intern. Marcus knows how to spool eighteen-gauge without kinking it, and your boy can manage the clip boxes."

"Caleb," Nora said. "His name is Caleb. And he’s nineteen, not a boy."

"He wears sneakers in the snow, Kelly. That makes him an apprentice until he buys real boots." Reid grabbed the door handle, then paused, looking back over his shoulder. The dim light of the shop caught the amber flecks in his eyes. "Be at the square at six-fifteen. If the transport truck shows up from Superior and the site isn't cleared of park benches, the driver will dump the cherry picker at the curb and leave us to drag it across the frozen slush ourselves."

"I have been on time to every job in this town for eight years," Nora said, her voice steady and dry. "Worry about your own alarm clock, Vance."

"Never missed one yet," he said. He gave the rim of his wool cap a mock salute, opened the door, and stepped out into the freeze.

The door clicked shut behind him. Nora sat in the quiet of her carriage house for several minutes, listening to the heavy diesel engine of his truck fire up, idle with a deep, rhythmic thrum, and then rumble away down the quiet, tree-lined street.

She picked up the coffee cup again, took another swallow, and looked down at the contract.

Forty-two thousand dollars. Half of that was twenty-one thousand. After materials, fuel for her truck, Caleb’s hourly wage, and the crane mats, she would clear sixteen grand. Sixteen grand was the exact price of the new commercial storage facility she had been eyeing down on Industrial Parkway. It meant no more storing thousand-foot spools in her father’s damp basement, no more tripping over seasonal inventory in her living room, and no more turning down large commercial bids because she didn't have the square footage to stage the gear.

She had to make this work. Even if it meant standing in a three-by-eight-foot steel basket forty yards above the frozen pavement with a man who thought safety glasses were an optional fashion accessory.

Nora stood up, stretched her aching back, and began packing her kit for the morning. She didn't pack light. Her commercial climbing harness came off its peg—a heavy, padded Petzl rig with steel D-rings, dual auto-locking lanyards, and an integrated tool holster. She checked the webbing for fraying, tested the gate on every carabiner, and laid out three pairs of insulated work gloves, ranging from light dexterity liners to arctic-grade leather mittens.

She pulled out her multimeter, two digital circuit analyzers, three rolls of self-fusing silicone tape, and five hundred heavy-duty, UV-stabilized branch clips designed to release at thirty pounds of sheer force—enough to hold against the wind, but weak enough to break before the wire could tear an entire lateral branch off the ancient spruce.

By nine o'clock, the shop was dark. Nora locked the deadbolt, crossed the narrow patch of lawn to her back porch, and climbed the stairs to her house. The town of Holly Falls was quiet beneath a growing blanket of cloud cover that promised snow before the week was out. To the west, the dark, pyramidal shape of the Great Spruce stood above the rooflines of Main Street, stark and empty against the cold night sky.

It looked less like a holiday centerpiece and more like an unfinished mountain.

At six o'clock the following morning, Town Square was an amphitheater of blue-black shadows, drifting exhaust, and bitter, bone-deep cold.

The mercury on the bank thermometer across from the gazebo read eighteen degrees. The wind was light, barely three knots out of the northwest, but it was the kind of damp, biting frost that settled into the joints of your hands the moment you stepped out of a heated vehicle.

Nora pulled her F-250 up to the southern curb of the square, her tires crunching over the thin layer of salt that the municipal plow had scattered along the gutters. Ahead of her, parked squarely in the loading zone with its hazard lights flashing rhythmically against the snowbanks, was a massive flatbed semi-trailer bearing the logo of a heavy-haul logistics firm out of Duluth.

Sitting on the bed of the trailer was the machine.

Even in the pre-dawn gloom, the JLG cherry picker looked monstrous. Its four massive foam-filled tires, each nearly five feet tall and aggressively treaded for mud and rock, were chained to the trailer bed with links the size of coffee cups. The long, telescoping steel boom—a three-stage hydraulic arm painted faded safety orange—lay folded down along the chassis, its heavy work basket tucked neatly over the front axle like the curled fist of a sleeping titan.

Standing near the trailer's rear outriggers was Reid Vance, a clip-board in one hand and a high-intensity flashlight in the other, arguing with a truck driver whose insulated coveralls made him look roughly the size of a black bear.

Nora shut off her engine, pulled her wool cap down over her ears, and climbed out of the cab. Her breath immediately formed thick, billowing clouds in the frigid air. Caleb, her nineteen-year-old assistant, tumbled out of the passenger side, looking bleary-eyed and shivering violently inside a puffy jacket that was clearly more suited for a high school ski trip than an industrial rigging site.

"Caleb," Nora said without stopping as she walked toward the trailer. "Go to the bed of the truck, grab the orange traffic cones and the caution tape. Set up a fifty-foot perimeter around the south sidewalk. Nobody walks through here. Not dog walkers, not early shoppers, nobody."

"Right, yeah. On it," Caleb stammered, his boots slipping on the curb as he scrambled back to the Ford.

Nora approached the trailer. Reid was shining his light directly into the secondary hydraulic manifold near the base of the boom.

"—I don't care what the Duluth depot said on the dispatch sheet," Reid was saying, his voice sharp and carrying easily over the clatter of the semi's idling diesel. "The hydraulic sight glass shows low on cold fluid. Look at that bubble. You run that boom out ninety feet in eighteen-degree weather with cold oil at that level, the cavitation will chew the pump to pieces before we hit forty feet."

The driver spat a stream of dark tobacco juice onto the slushy asphalt. "Look, buddy, I just haul 'em. The yard checked it off yesterday at four. You got an issue, call Superior."

"I don't need to call Superior," Nora interrupted, stepping between them and pointing her own penlight at the brass casing near the valve block. "Reid's right. It’s two quarts low on ISO 32 hydraulic fluid. And your emergency descent bleed valve has road salt caked around the seal."

The driver looked from Nora to Reid, his expression one of pure, unadulterated regional exhaustion. "Are both of you going to climb all over my rig, or is someone going to sign the bill of lading?"

"We sign when the machine is on the ground, the fluid is topped off, and the auxiliary controls pass the dead-man test," Nora said calmly. She looked at Reid. "Did the timber mats arrive?"

Reid nodded toward the far corner of the square. A second flatbed—a local flat-stake truck from Pine Ridge Lumber—was already parked against the gazebo, its driver waiting patiently inside the warm cab. Stacked on the bed were twenty massive, weathered oak crane mats, each six inches thick, four feet wide, and twelve feet long.

"They just pulled in," Reid said. "Marcus is over there unstrapping the load."

Nora looked across the square. Marcus, Reid’s primary field tech, was an older, taciturn man who looked like he had been born wearing high-visibility orange and steel toes. He was already working the ratchet binders with steady, rhythmic precision.

"Alright," Nora said, turning back to the truck driver. "Drop your ramps. We have two gallons of Shell Tellus 32 in the back of my truck. We top the reservoir, we walk it off the trailer onto the street, and we verify the boom cycle before you leave this site. Clear?"

The driver grumbled something about northern contractors and holiday pay, but he turned toward the hydraulic controls of the trailer bed without further argument.

Reid lowered his clipboard, looking down at Nora from beneath the brim of his cap. In the flashing amber light of the truck’s hazard signals, his features were sharp, shadowed, and entirely unamused. "You carry ISO 32 in your regular truck inventory?"

"I own a hydraulic line puller, Vance. Unlike some people, I don't wait for my equipment to seize up before I check the seals." She pulled her leather gloves tighter over her wrists. "Let’s get these mats down. If we aren't positioned under the south boughs by eight, Gable will be out here with a clipboard asking why we’re burning taxpayer daylight."

For the next forty-five minutes, the professional animosity was swallowed by the brutal, physical labor of staging eighteen tons of steel and wood in subzero weather.

They worked with an efficiency that neither would have willingly acknowledged. Reid used his Ram’s front winch and heavy snatch blocks to slide the oak timber mats off the delivery truck, while Nora and Marcus guided them into place on the frozen turf, creating a continuous wooden highway that stretched from the asphalt curb across the park lawn to the drip line of the Great Spruce. Caleb ran back and forth with orange safety markers, staking out the hazard zone and keeping an eye out for early-morning municipal workers heading toward Town Hall.

By seven-thirty, the heavy cherry picker had been unloaded, its fluid levels brought to spec, and its giant tires walked slowly, deliberately, across the timber road. The oak beams groaned and creaked beneath the immense weight of the machine, but the ground held. The turf didn't buckle. The irrigation lines beneath the sod remained intact.

The machine sat at its first designated staging post, fifteen feet from the southern skirt of the Great Spruce.

Up close, the tree was staggering. It wasn't just tall; it was ancient and massive. Its trunk at the base was nearly four feet in diameter, covered in thick, rough bark that had weathered a century of Minnesota freezes. The lower boughs, thick as telephone poles, swept outward and downward, their tips nearly brushing the snow, before the canopy rose in dense, overlapping tiers into the pale winter sky. The smell of fresh, cold pine was overpowering, thick and sharp enough to clear Nora’s sinuses completely.

A municipal van pulled up to the curb, its side panels advertising Holly Falls Department of Public Works. Two workers hopped out and began unloading wooden pallets wrapped in black shrink-wrap onto the sidewalk.

"There they are," Reid said, walking up beside Nora and wiping grease from his knuckles with a shop rag. "Twenty thousand points of nostalgic civic pride."

Nora walked over to the pallets. She pulled a utility knife from her belt and slit the plastic wrap, peeling it back to reveal stacked cardboard cartons marked with the town council’s purchase order numbers. Inside each box were heavy spools of multi-color ceramic C9s, their facets catching the gray morning light like rows of dull jewels.

She picked up a strand, inspecting the copper leads and the molded plastic bases. "They're eighteen-gauge, all right. Chinese manufacturing, commercial rating. The insulation is PVC, not rubber."

"Which means it gets stiff fast below freezing," Reid noted, stepping up next to her and testing the flexibility of the wire with his bare fingers. "If we leave the spools on the ground in the cold, they’ll uncoil like giant springs and kink every ten feet. We need to keep the reserve boxes inside the municipal maintenance shed until the minute we’re ready to hoist them."

"Agreed," Nora said. She looked at him, surprised despite herself. "You're actually thinking about thermal flexibility."

"I do this for a living, Kelly. I don't just stand on roofs looking pretty."

"Could have fooled me," she muttered under her breath, turning back to the truck. "Caleb! Marcus! Start hauling these cartons into the heated vestibule at Town Hall. Keep them off the bare concrete. Five boxes at a time."

"Right away, Nora!" Caleb shouted, eager to escape the wind.

The clock in the Town Hall tower struck eight, its deep, metallic chime reverberating across the empty square.

The sound had barely faded when a heavy municipal sedan pulled up behind Nora's truck. Mayor Sterling and Councilman Gable stepped out, both bundled in thick overcoats, looking like a pair of judges arriving at an execution. Gable had a clip-board tucked firmly beneath his arm, his breath puffing out like a steam locomotive.

"Well," Gable barked, stomping his boots onto the curb. "The monster is here. I assume you two haven't broken any city property yet?"

"Not yet, Gary," Reid called out, not bothering to drop the shop rag from his hands. "The lawn is pristine. The rig is positioned. We’re on schedule."

Gable eyed the timber mats, walking a few steps along the edge of the wood track, clearly searching for an excuse to criticize the setup. Finding none, he turned his glare toward the orange steel machine and its dual-man basket resting at ground level.

"The council had an emergency session at seven," Sterling said, his voice softer than Gable's, though no less serious. "The weather service out of Duluth upgraded the weekend advisory. We have an arctic front coming down from Manitoba on Tuesday. Sustained winds of thirty miles an hour, gusts up to fifty, with six to eight inches of heavy wet snow."

Nora felt a tight knot form in her chest. "Tuesday? The forecast yesterday said Thursday."

"The jet stream dipped," Gable snapped. "Which means your completion window just shrank by forty-eight hours. You don't have ten days. You have eight. If that tree isn't fully rigged, tested, and certified before the storm hits, the high-voltage lines will whip, the unanchored branches will tear, and this town will be spending forty thousand dollars on a pile of kindling and broken glass."

Reid didn't flinch, but Nora saw the subtle shift in his weight, the sudden tightening of the muscles along his jawline. Eight days. With twenty thousand bulbs, the rib-and-finger layout, and four repositioning moves for an eighteen-ton aerial platform.

"The contract said ten days," Nora said, stepping toward Gable. "If the town changes the timeline, the liquidated damages clause has to be waived."

"Not happening," Gable said flatly. "The contract states 'completion prior to severe winter weather events as determined by the municipal authority.' Page seven, subsection B. You both signed it. You wanted the prestige? You wanted forty-two thousand dollars of Holly Falls tax revenue? Then you deliver the tree before the blizzard hits."

Mayor Sterling held up a placating hand. "Gary, let’s not turn this into an adversarial proceeding. Nora, Reid, you two are the best we have. If anyone can do this, it's you. But the town cannot afford a dark square for the jubilee. We have tourists booked in every bed-and-breakfast from here to the interstate."

"We understand, Arthur," Reid said, his voice entirely devoid of its usual casual arrogance. He looked at Nora, a rare, unprompted look of direct, professional solidarity passing between them for a split second. "We’ll make the deadline."

"You'd better," Gable said. He pointed a stubby, gloved finger at the aerial basket. "Get your harnesses on. The public works department is watching. I want to see that boom extended before I finish my second cup of coffee."

The two council members turned and walked back toward the warm brick facade of Town Hall, leaving Nora and Reid standing alone by the base of the Great Spruce.

The wind picked up slightly, rustling through the dense needles of the upper canopy with a low, dry hiss that sounded suspiciously like a warning.

Nora looked at the basket. It was eight feet wide, thirty-six inches deep, with a galvanized steel mesh floor and waist-high safety railings. It was designed to hold two men, their tools, and a limited payload of materials.

Up there, ninety feet above the frozen square, there would be no room for ego, no room for old family rivalries, and zero tolerance for error.

"Eight days," Nora said quietly.

"Eight days," Reid repeated. He tossed the shop rag into the bed of his truck and walked toward the cherry picker's control pedestal, unhooking his climbing harness from his shoulder. "Grab your lanyard, Kelly. Let's go see what ninety feet looks like from the wrong side of a frozen spruce."