And the building hasn't stopped. We've settled into the rotation by now, the three of them and me, a day each, the way I planned it, like a campaign. A kayak with Hudson. A job site with Logan. The diner with Finn. Then around again.
And in between, the small stuff. Coffee runs and a walk down Main. Hudson turning up at the school gate one afternoon with iced coffees for the whole staff, which Lily has not let me hear the end of. Logan fixing a hinge in my classroom that nobody asked him to fix. Finn textingeat somethingat noon like a man who's decided this is his job now.
It's been days of this. Days of being touched in public and talked about in private and slowly, without anyone deciding to, becoming a thing the town tells time by. And every day thelie gets a little more real and a little harder to remember I'm supposed to give it back.
By now Dottie's intelligence network has done what it does, and the news has gone everywhere news goes in this town, which is everywhere.
I find out exactly how everywhere when I stop at the bakery on Main for a coffee before school. The woman behind the counter, whom I've spoken maybe forty words to in five years, leans across the pastry case. “I heard about you and the Morrow boy,” she says, in the soft, thrilled voice people use for engagements and surgeries.
“There's no, we're not,” I start, on pure reflex. Then I have to swallow it. Becauseyes we are.That's the whole point. This is the thing I asked for, and I should really stop being startled every single time it works. “We're taking it slow,” I say instead.
“Slow.” She nods like I've said something profound. “That's how the good ones go. My Harold and I took it slow. Forty-one years.” She leans closer, lowers her voice to a register meant for state secrets. “And I hear there'smorethan one.”
“I, um.”
“You don't have to say. A girl keeps her cards.” She's already sliding my coffee across, and she doesn't charge me for it, which is somehow the most alarming thing that's happened all morning. “On the house. For young love.”
“You really don't have to.”
“I really do. I've been waiting six years to do that, honey. Let me have it.”
It's the one kind of lie I can manage with a straight face, thetaking it slowpart. The kind that's technically true. You can't go slower than a relationship that doesn't exist.
I take my free coffee of guilt out into the June sun and walk to school.
It does not help that this is the last week of term. The whole town's already soft and sentimental, the way it gets every June. A few more days and the room empties out, the little chairs go up on the little tables, and I hand twelve children back to summer and become a woman with twelve weeks of unstructured time and a fake pack to dismantle.
The kids can feel it coming the way they feel everything, in their feet. They've been feral since Monday. I've broken up two arguments about whose turn it is to be line leader and confiscated one rock that Atlas described, with total sincerity, as his.
Past the hardware store, where old man Smith lifts his hand off his broom to wave. Past the Clip & Curl, where I make the tactical error of glancing in the window.
Cynthia Morrow is at her station with a client half-foiled. She sees me, and she lights up like the whole salon's wired to her mood. She mouths something through the glass that I'm fairly sure iscall me,her hand doing the little phone shape next to her face.
I wave back with the bright, composed confidence of a woman with everything under control.
I am not a woman with everything under control. I've lost the thread entirely and I'm running on nerve and momentum.
It has been one day. One public dinner with one alpha, and the whole county has decided I'm finally building a pack, which around here is roughly the excitement level of a royal engagement. They've only seen me with Finn so far. They don't know about the other two yet.
And the awful thing, the thing I can't say out loud, is that it'sworking.I told a lie to get out of one bad afternoon at a reunion, and it's grown a whole town around it, and some traitor part of me is enjoying it.
By Thursday it's worse,because by Thursday Cynthia hasplans.
I know this because she finds my number. I never gave Cynthia my number. I have a brief, vivid nightmare about the chain of custody on that, Dottie to Marie to the salon appointment book to who knows, and then my phone is buzzing with a text from an unknown Hollow number that can only be one person.
Josie!! It's Cynthia (Finn's mom) :) I know you two are keeping it low key and I respect that SO much. Just one tiny thing. I'm doing my big roast a week this Sunday, I've finally got Gemma to promise she won't book herself a single emergency that whole day, and I would LOVE to have you. Nothing fancy!! Just family :) :) Finn knows the way.
I read it four times.
Just family. Dinner. At her house. Her table, her roast, Gemma wrangled into one whole evening off the clock, all of us around it like something true.
And the truly inconvenient thing is that it helps. Nothing notarizes a relationship like a Sunday roast with the mother, and that's exactly the kind of bulletproof I need before the reunion. I should be relieved. I am, a little.
What I can't account for is the other part. The part that readjust familyand felt something flip over that had nothing to do with the plan and everything to do with the way Finn's hands move.
I put the phone face-down on the snack table and inform Lily, very calmly, that the operation is going so well I'm being invited to Sunday dinner by a family that doesn't technically exist.
“You told one lie to your mother and accidentally gave this town a love story,” Lily says, not looking up from the crackersituation. “People love a love story. You gave them one. Now they want the sequel and the merch.”
