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Today he found it harder than usual to care about any of it.

He found the next thing on the list. He did it. He thought about her the entire time.

Chapter 20

What He Wants

She slept until seven.

This was unusual. She was a person who woke early, who found the early hours useful, who generally had her coffee and her lake through the window and at least one productive thought before seven in the morning. She had been doing this consistently since August.

She slept until seven on Wednesday morning and woke up like someone who has been far away in her sleep and is not all the way back yet.

She lay in bed and looked at the ceiling.

She thought about Shane Colter kissing her in the snow in front of Founders Square at nine fifteen on a Tuesday night.

She thought about it very specifically and in considerable detail.

She got up.

* * *

The rational approach, she told herself while making coffee, was to treat this calmly. She was a thirty-four-year-old woman with eight years of professional experience and a reasonable amount of life behind her and she was capable of approaching a situation with equanimity and perspective and...

She spilled the coffee grounds on the counter.

She cleaned them up.

She stood at the kitchen window with her coffee and looked at Clearwater Lake through the gap in the snow-covered spruce trees, the lake dark and still and enormous in the December morning, the mountains white behind it, the whole scene so quiet and beautiful it felt slightly unfair, and thought:

He kissed me.

And then:

I kissed him back.

And then, with the warmth of someone discovering that a thing they’d been carefully not hoping for had actually happened:

Oh.

She stood at the window for a while.

The rational approach could wait.

* * *

She called Lauren at seven twenty.

Lauren picked up on the second ring.

“Something happened,” Lauren said. Not a question.

“How did you...”

“You texted me something happened at nine thirty last night and then when I called you back you talked for forty-five minutes and I let you go to sleep and now it’s seven twenty and you’re calling me again.” A pause. “Also Margaret Finley texted me at six thirty this morning.”

Allison put her face in her hand. “What did Margaret say.”