She kept walking. At the Mercantile, Edgar was at the counter instead of Rufus, sorting a delivery of jarred preserves with the careful attention he gave everything. He looked up when she came in and smiled, but it was half a beat slower than usual.
"Isla. What can I get you?"
"Salt. The coarse kind, if you've got it. I’m running low on my mix already, given the spring storms." She had tried to make a joke out of it, but fell flat.
"Should have some in the back." He disappeared through the storeroom door.
A woman browsing the herb shelf near the window glanced at Isla, then looked away. Not unfriendly. Evaluating, as if she was deciding what the risks were by being near her.
Edgar came back with the salt. "Anything else?"
"That's it. Thank you."
He rang her up. On her way out, he said, "Lot of weather talk this morning. People get nervous when the spring storms stack up like this."
"They should. Spring storms are unpredictable."
"That's what I told them." He held her gaze for a moment, steady. Then he went back to his preserves.
She walked out into the square. The feeling was everywhere now that she was looking for it. Not hostility. Hollow Oak didn't work that way, at least not in her experience. It was subtler, arecalibration happening in real time, the community adjusting its posture the way a person adjusted when they heard a sound they couldn't identify. Watchful. Careful. Waiting to see what happened next.
She'd felt this before. In two of the four towns she'd left, the shift had started exactly like this. Not anger but caution. Not accusations but questions asked just out of earshot. The weather's been strange lately, hasn't it? Didn't that start around the time she arrived? The questions never required answers because the answers were already built into the asking.
The old response was in her legs before she'd consciously thought it. Go home. Pack light. Leave before the caution turned into something harder. She'd done it enough times that the sequence was almost muscle memory, and for a moment, crossing the square with a bag of salt in her hand, she felt the pull of it so strongly she had to stop walking.
She stood on the cobblestones where it was flat and silver in the afternoon light. The dock visible at the eastern bank, the Ashvane sitting in her mooring. Somewhere below that deck, Rafe was fixing what she'd broken.
Maybe she just needed a lay. That was the cleanest explanation. She hadn't been with anyone in over a year. The proximity and the storm had done what proximity and storms did, and the man had hands that knew what they were doing. Simple. Biological. Nothing that required analysis or follow-up or the pathetic spiral she'd been running since she woke up alone in her bed this morning and found a neatly folded blanket on her sofa.
He'd slept on the floor. She kept circling back to that like a dog with a bone it couldn't bury. He'd had sex with her on her kitchen counter and then slept on her floor because he hadn't assumed the counter gave him access to her bed. Who did that?What kind of man had that distinction ready in his head after what they'd done?
The kind who was leaving in four days. That kind.
She made herself keep walking.
The lakeside path brought her past the lower dock structures, the small equipment sheds and storage buildings that sat closest to the waterline. A crew was already working there, stacking sandbags along the foundations where last night's storm had pushed water up past the usual high mark. Spring runoff was swelling the feeder channels, and with more weather expected, the low-lying structures needed reinforcement before the next front.
Rowan was directing the effort. He stood at the far end of the retaining wall with a clipboard, his dark hair tied back, work jacket open over a thermal that was already dirty. Two of his regular crew were hauling bags from a flatbed cart while a third man was measuring water marks on the shed walls with a tape.
She'd spoken to Rowan maybe five times in the year she'd been here. Practical conversations, never long. He was Rafe's type in some ways, steady, not much excess talk, competent without needing to announce it. Diana's mate, she'd gathered, though neither of them advertised it.
He noticed her when she was twenty feet away and gave her a nod that carried no extra weight. "Isla."
"You need help?"
He looked at her, assessing the offer. "You know sandbag placement?"
"I know water. I know where it goes when it's moving fast. I can tell you which of these foundations is going to take the worst of it if another front comes through."
He considered that for about three seconds. "Show me."
She walked the retaining wall with him, reading the water stains on the stone, the angle of the drainage slope, the way theground had settled unevenly near the oldest shed. She pointed to the southeast corner where the wall met the bank. "This section. The grade drops by about four inches over the last ten feet and the runoff from the upper channel is going to funnel straight into this joint. Last night's storm pushed water to here." She pointed at a dark line on the stone. "Next one will go higher."
"How much higher?"
"Depends on the front. If it's another mountain system like last night, you'll get two to three inches above that line. If it comes off the lake, more."
"And you'd know which one it is."
