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“Please.” Allison looked up. The woman had white hair and steady eyes and the expression of someone who had seen a great many things and found most of them interesting. “I’m Allison,” she said. “I’m the new...”

“Art teacher.” The woman refilled her cup with the ease of long practice. “We heard.” She set the coffee pot down on the next table and looked at Allison with a directness that might have been unsettling except that it was also, somehow, warm. “How do you like Merrybrook so far?”

“I’ve been here one morning.”

“That’s usually enough.”

Allison looked down at her coffee. “The coffee tastes...” She stopped, not sure how to finish the sentence without sounding strange.

The woman waited.

“It tastes like...” She shook her head. “Never mind. It’s good coffee.”

The woman picked up the coffee pot. Her eyes held something, not quite amusement, not quite satisfaction. Something older than either.

“Maybe it’s the water,” she said, and went back to the counter.

Allison sat at her table for another hour.

She didn’t mind.

Chapter 3

The Colter Name

She learned, on her second morning, that Molly Hart had a gift.

Not for coffee, though the coffee was excellent. Not for remembering faces, though she’d clearly catalogued Allison’s on sight. The gift was something more specific: she knew what you needed before you finished deciding you needed it, and she delivered it without making you feel watched.

Allison had walked into the Merrybrook Café, The Brook, she was already thinking of it as The Brook, she wasn’t sure when that had happened, at eight in the morning with the vague intention of ordering something caffeinated and then sitting quietly until her brain finished waking up. She’d found a table by the window, the same one she’d sat at the day before, and was still looking at the menu card when Molly appeared.

“Black coffee,” Molly said, setting down a wide ceramic mug, “and the cinnamon roll, because you looked at the case when you walked past it.”

Allison looked up. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to.” Molly was already turning away. “It’s from the bakery. Joseph drops them off every morning at seven thirty. Nobody ever regrets it.”

The cinnamon roll was the size of a small plate and smelled like the best version of every cinnamon roll she’d ever eaten. She pulled off a piece and ate it and sat very still for a moment while her brain recalibrated its understanding of what cinnamon rolls could be.

“Okay,” she said quietly, to no one.

The coffee tasted like it had yesterday, like something warm that had nothing to do with the coffee itself. Like the comfort of a Saturday morning with nowhere to be. She drank it slowly and watched Main Street wake up through the window: a woman with a dog who seemed to know every person they passed, a teenager on a bicycle who waved at someone in the hardware store across the street, two older men who stopped in front of the Merrybrook Market to have what appeared to be a very important conversation about something they kept pointing at.

She was on her second cup when the door opened and someone came in and sat down across from her.

She blinked.

The person who had sat across from her was somewhere in their early forties, with the kind of face that was immediately interesting, not beautiful exactly, but alert, the eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses moving over the café with the systematic pleasure of someone cataloguing everything in a room and finding it all worth cataloguing. They wore a flannel shirt in a pattern that had seen better days and carried a canvas bag so full of papers and notebooks that it strained at the seam, and they sat down across from Allison with the comfort of someone who sat across from strangers all the time and had never found it awkward once.

“You’re the new art teacher,” they said.

“People keep knowing that,” Allison said.

“Small town.” They stuck out a hand. “Rory Pike. I run the Historical Society.”

She shook it. “Allison Hayes.”

“I know.” Rory settled back in the chair and looked at her with frank, unguarded curiosity. “How are you finding Merrybrook?”