Page 7

Clearwater Lake at dusk was a different thing entirely from Clearwater Lake in the afternoon. The light had gone rose and amber at the edges, the mountains reflecting in the water in deeper colors now, the surface just barely moving, just barely, like the lake was breathing.

Allison stood at the window for a long time.

She hadn’t cried in the car, which had felt like an accomplishment at the time. She wasn’t going to cry now either, she decided, which turned out to be only partly true, her eyes went warm and full and she let them, standing at the window in a room she’d never been in before that somehow felt more like hers than the apartment she’d spent three years in. She didn’t wipe her eyes. She just let the feeling move through her and pass, the way feelings did when you stopped arguing with them.

Outside, the lake went still.

Pepper appeared in the room (she had no idea how, the door was closed, she was certain she’d pulled it shut) and jumped silently onto the window seat beside her and pressed her small warm weight against Allison’s hip and began, quietly, to purr.

Allison looked down at her.

“Okay,” she said softly. “Okay.”

She sat down on the window seat, the cat against her side, the lake going dark and silver below, and she called her sister.

“You made it,” Becca said immediately.

“I made it.”

“And?”

She looked out the window. The first star had appeared over the mountain to the east, sharp and deliberate against the darkening sky.

“It’s real,” she said. “I was starting to wonder, but it’s real.”

“Of course it’s real.” A pause. “How’s the room?”

Allison looked around. At the quilt, at the wardrobe, at the writing desk with a small glass vase on it that held a single wildflower she was almost certain hadn’t been there when she’d walked in. “It’s...” She stopped. “It’s exactly right.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She settled deeper into the window seat. Pepper purred. The lake went silver. “Becca, I think I did something right.”

Her sister was quiet, and when she spoke her voice was soft in the way it only got when she was trying not to cry and didn’t want to admit it. “I know you did.”

They talked for another twenty minutes, about nothing important, about the drive, about the inn cat, about the wildflower in the vase that Allison couldn’t explain, and when they hung up the room had gone fully dark except for the lamp on the writing desk, which she didn’t remember turning on.

She sat with that for a moment.

Then decided some things were better left unexamined and went to find the tea.

* * *

There was a knock at her door at some point after ten, quiet, not urgent, and when she opened it there was no one there. Just the hallway, warm and dim, and on the floor outside her door a small tray with a pot of tea and a single cup and a sprig of something she thought might be lavender laid across the saucer.

She looked down the hallway. Empty both directions.

She picked up the tray.

Maybe it’s the water, she thought, for reasons she couldn’t have explained, and went back inside.

* * *

She woke early.

Early enough that the lake was still misted over, the fog sitting low on the water in long drifts that the morning light moved through slowly. She lay in the bed under the blue and green quilt and watched it through the window and felt, carefully, at her own interior, checking for the anxiety she’d expected to find, the second guessing, the familiar weight of what have you done.

It wasn’t there.