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“Would you want to get something warm,” he said. “At The Brook.”

He had worked out the sentence on the way down. It was ten words long, and it had taken him four months.

“Yes,” she said, before he had quite finished. Then, as if she had heard herself: “Yes. I’d like that.”

She turned and waved at Lauren’s windshield. Lauren waved back and pulled out of the lot at a speed that suggested she was already dialing someone.

* * *

He drove them into town with the heater roaring and her sketchbook on her knees, and neither of them said much, and that was fine. That was better than fine.

The Brook on a Saturday afternoon was half-empty and warm and smelled like coffee. Nora looked up when the bell rang. She looked at Allison. She looked at Shane, standing behind her, holding the door. Then she turned to the machine without a word, which was louder than anything she could have said.

They took the table by the window. Nora brought two mugs without asking what they wanted, hot chocolate for Allison and black coffee for him, in one of the heavy gray mugs from the back shelf.

Allison looked at the mug. She looked at him.

“Payne’s gray,” she said.

“Galvanized.”

Nora looked from one of them to the other, decided whatever it was could wait, and went back to the counter.

They stayed two hours. He didn’t notice them go. She told him about the ridge from her side, all the things he had walked past a hundred times that she had stopped for. He told her who had carved his initials into the gazebo railing in 1974 (Rick Brennan, who still denied it), and she laughed again, the loud one, and at the far table Vera Hutchins looked up from her crossword and reached for her phone.

He let her.

It was a date. He knew it somewhere in the second hour. Neither of them had said the word, and neither of them was going to, and it was one anyway.

It was the easiest two hours he had spent in years. Nobody needed anything fixed. He did not have to be useful. He only had to sit across from her with a gray mug and answer when she asked him something, and she asked him a great many things.

When the light outside started going blue, they walked out together into the cold. On the sidewalk she turned to him, tugging her hat back down over her ears.

“Thank you for asking,” she said.

“I wanted to,” he said.

She smiled at him, the full one, and walked off toward Lakeview Lane with her sketchbook under her arm. He watched her until she turned the corner.

Then he walked home. There was a list waiting for him. There always was. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t go looking for the next thing on it.

Chapter 18

Almost

The town planning meeting was on a Tuesday in December, which meant it started at seven and ended at nine and covered approximately forty percent of what it was supposed to cover, which was standard.

Allison had been going to the town meetings since October, when Nora had mentioned them in the tone she used for things that weren’t optional, and she’d discovered they were exactly what she would have expected from Merrybrook, organized chaos, strong opinions about things that didn’t strictly require strong opinions, and a level of genuine investment in the town’s collective well-being that she found, every time, quietly moving.

This one was about the spring festival planning. And the road on the north side of Clearwater Lake that needed attention. And something Rick Brennan felt strongly about regarding the market’s signage, which took twenty minutes and was ultimately tabled.

She sat two rows from the front, between Lauren and Rory, and took notes because she was a teacher and taking notes was what she did in meetings, and thought about the library windows and the winter project and the thing that had happened on Thursday morning that she had been thinking about with the frequency of a song she couldn’t get out of her head. She had thought about it on the ridge on Saturday too, and across a table at The Brook afterward with him sitting right there, which had not helped at all.

Allison.

Just her name. In a quiet classroom. Said in his voice in the way he said things that cost him something, low and even and careful, except it hadn’t been careful, it had come out before the careful could catch it, and she knew the difference.

She’d been very still for the rest of that morning. She’d sat at her supply station after he’d left and looked at the window he’d fixed, smooth now, moving freely, and felt something she didn’t have precise language for. Something that was part of wanting and part of being afraid of wanting and part of the understanding that the wanting had been there for a while and she’d been carefully not looking at it directly.