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She went to Thistle & Ink on the way to Margaret’s, because she needed to walk and the December afternoon was cold and clear and the snow on Main Street was beautiful in the way things were beautiful after they’d been cleaned by snow, all the usual textures gone smooth and white and the whole town looking washed and new.

She needed to think.

She walked past Colter Hardware.

The lights were on inside. She could see Doug at the counter. She could see the workshop light.

She walked past at her normal pace. She did not slow down. She did not look at the workshop light for more than a moment.

She went into Thistle & Ink.

The bell above the door rang and the smell of old paper and pine found her and she stood inside for a moment and let the familiar quality of the place settle around her, the creaking floors, the shelving units going to the ceiling, Henry Ellis’s careful arrangement of the display in the window that Claire periodically feuded with him about and periodically conceded was good.

“Afternoon,” Claire said, from somewhere between the shelves. Not appearing, just present.

“Afternoon,” Allison said.

She moved through the store with no destination in mind, trailing her fingers along the spines of things. She wasn’t looking for anything. She was using the bookshop the way she’d started to use The Brook and the walk to school and the porch at the cottage, as a place where her thoughts arranged themselves into something more coherent than they were elsewhere.

She was thinking about what Lauren had said. He doesn’t do things he’s not sure about.

She was thinking about a man who checked every board in the fence and not just the broken one. Who had learned the sound of her arrival at The Brook. Who had said her name like something he’d been keeping and had finally let out.

She was thinking about the fact that she had, for two years with Ryan, been very sure about something that had turned out to be nothing. And she was wondering how you knew the difference, between sure and wrong, between wanting and being wanted back.

A book fell off a shelf.

She stopped.

She looked at it on the floor. She looked at the shelf it had come from, where the books on either side stood perfectly upright, undisturbed.

She picked it up.

On Courage: Essays on the Decision to Begin.

She looked at it.

She looked up at Claire, who had appeared at the end of the aisle with the expression of someone who had seen this happen approximately forty times and was maintaining a professional relationship with it.

“Old shelves,” Claire said serenely.

“That one’s not subtle,” Allison said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Allison looked at the book in her hand. Then at the shelf. Then at Claire, who was already disappearing back between the stacks.

She bought the book.

* * *

Margaret Finley’s house was on Elm Street, three blocks from Main, a white house with a green door and a porch that Harold had apparently rebuilt twice and Margaret had opinions about both times. She arrived a little before four to find the door open before she’d knocked, which was either Margaret or Merrybrook or both.

“Come in, come in,” Margaret said, with the energy of someone who had been expecting this visit with pleasure for approximately eighteen hours. “Take your coat off. Tea’s ready.”

The Finley kitchen was exactly what she would have expected, warm, slightly cluttered in the good way, things on every surface that had been there long enough to belong there. A round table in the center with four chairs and a tablecloth that had been ironed. The smell of something baked.

Margaret poured tea and put a plate of shortbread on the table and sat down across from Allison and looked at her with her directness, the comprehensive warmth of a woman who had been paying attention to people for seventy-two years and was very good at it.