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“And Merrybrook.” She shook her head slightly. “I don’t even remember clicking it. I was going through the job board at like eleven at night and I just... did. I don’t know why. The listing was barely a paragraph. The salary shouldn’t have been that good for a school that small.”

“Maybe it was exactly that good because it was exactly right.”

“Or maybe they’re desperate because nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere.”

“You want to live in the middle of nowhere.”

Allison opened her mouth. Closed it.

“I don’t know what I want,” she said finally. “That’s the problem. I packed everything I own into a storage unit and a twelve-year-old Honda and drove into the mountains because something told me to and I don’t. I don’t know if that’s brave or just...”

The road curved.

It happened without warning, a wide, sweeping bend she had to slow down for, the highway arcing hard to the right, and she came around it with her hands tight on the wheel and then...

She hit the brake without meaning to.

The car rolled to a stop on the shoulder.

She sat there with both hands on the wheel and stared.

The mountains opened up around a valley she hadn’t known was coming, green and impossibly contained, like something cupped gently in enormous palms. The trees fell away on either side and there it was... the valley, just sitting there, patient and golden in the late-afternoon light, like it had been waiting for her to come around that bend for quite some time and was in no particular hurry about it.

And at the bottom of the valley, catching the sun in a way that made her breath stop somewhere in her chest, was a lake.

Silver. Still. The mountains reflected in it so perfectly it looked like the water had been painted there by someone who wanted to make a point.

And around the lake, tucked against the landscape like it had grown there naturally, like the trees had simply decided, one winter, to arrange themselves into something intentional, was a town.

Small. Quiet. The kind of place that had a church steeple and a main street and smoke coming from at least two chimneys even in August.

The kind of place that looked like someone had imagined it and then been very careful to keep it that way.

Allison realized she’d stopped breathing.

She didn’t know how long she sat there. Long enough that the light shifted slightly, the sun dropping another degree toward the mountains, the lake below going from silver to something closer to gold. Long enough that Becca said her name twice before she heard it.

“I stopped,” she said.

“You stopped? Why? Did the car...”

“No. I just...” She searched for the right word and couldn’t find one that was big enough. “I can see it. The town.” She paused. “Becca. There’s a lake.”

“Is it pretty?”

Allison laughed, a little shakily, which surprised her. She hadn’t expected to feel like crying and she wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s pretty.”

Something happened then that she didn’t have words for yet.

Something that felt, in a way she couldn’t have explained to anyone who asked, like recognition. Like walking into a room and realizing you’d dreamed it once, a long time ago, and forgotten until just this moment.

Below, the lake had gone completely still. Not a ripple on the surface, even though she could see the tree line moving in a slight wind. She noticed this distantly, the way you notice something that doesn’t quite make sense and file it away before your brain can decide what to do with it.

Oh, something in her said.

Just that.

Oh.