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She saw Vera Hutchins telling someone something that was making them laugh. She saw Joseph talking to Rick Brennan with the patient warmth he brought to every conversation. She saw Sophie Marsh helping her mother carry something from the back room, the careful competence of a child who’d grown up watching adults do things and learned how to help.

She thought about the job she’d clicked apply to at eleven at night, for reasons she still couldn’t quite explain.

She looked at the table full of people who had become, in three months, something she didn’t have a precise word for. Not family. She had family. Something alongside that. Something only Merrybrook had.

She felt, sitting at the long Thanksgiving table in the school gym with her soup and Earl’s carved spoon and the whole of a town she’d stumbled into, a fullness that had nothing to do with the food.

She was aware, peripherally, of the empty seat near the end of the table.

She was aware, later, when the dinner was past its first hour and the noise had settled into its comfortable sustained hum, of someone coming in the back door.

She didn’t look.

She knew.

He was late because something had needed fixing (she didn’t know what, she would find out later it was a burst pipe at the Kowalskis’ that had chosen Thanksgiving to make itself known) and he came in quietly, took the empty chair, accepted whatever was put in front of him without discussion, and looked up once across the table.

His eyes found hers the way they had been finding hers for three months, the directness of it, the absence of looking away.

She looked back.

Something passed between them in the noise and warmth of the Thanksgiving table that she couldn’t have transcribed if someone had asked her to. Just the fact of it. Just the acknowledgment of the fact of it. Just two people at a long table in a small town seeing each other clearly and not looking away.

He nodded once.

She picked up her spoon.

Her face was warm and she was going to blame the soup.

He left before the pie. She watched him lean down to say something to Rick, and pick up his jacket, and go out the back door into the dark, and a minute later Rick told the table, to no one in particular, that the Kowalskis’ pipe needed another look. She had been going to ask him to come sit by the fire with her and Becca after. She had been going to ask him a lot of things.

She ate her pie. It was pumpkin, and it tasted a little like waiting.

* * *

That night, with wine and the fire going and the lake dark outside, Allison told Becca all of it.

She started at the coffee collision and didn’t stop until the empty chair tonight. Becca had heard pieces of it on the phone since August, but never all of it at once, out loud, in order. It sounded different that way. It sounded like a story that was going somewhere.

The fire burned lower while she talked. When she finished, the room was quiet except for the old cottage creaking in the cold.

Becca was quiet.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay what.”

“Okay I understand now why you didn’t call me after the festival.”

Allison looked at the embers. “Some things needed to stay mine for a while.”

“I know.” Becca pulled her knees up on the couch. “He sounds like someone who doesn’t do things by accident.”

“He doesn’t.”

“So none of it was by accident.”

Allison thought about the crowd he’d walked through. About Allison said like a decision. About twelve units of exterior caulk already in stock, crossed out. She didn’t know about the caulk. But she would have understood it.