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He read it again in the truck with the engine running and the heater roaring and his breath fogging up the windshield.

It was warm. It sounded like her. It sounded exactly like the woman who had handed him the bigger piece of bread without looking.

It also sounded like a woman who had laughed at her phone so hard the whole Brook turned around. Who had turned something over so he wouldn’t see it. Who maybe needed some room to figure out a thing he didn’t know about, and was being kind to him in the meantime, because that was who she was. She was kind to everyone. She had been kind to Rory for a whole hour about survey maps.

Let her set the pace, he had told himself at the lake. If she needs space, give it to her.

This was him giving it to her. That was what he told himself.

He typed Busy week. Inventory.

He looked at it for a long time. It was the kind of text Doug would have taken out back and put out of its misery.

He sent it.

The reply came four minutes later.

No worries! Another time and a smiling face.

He stared at the exclamation point.

He spent the whole drive home trying to decide what that exclamation point meant. Whether it meant no worries or oh thank goodness or I understand, it’s fine or that hurt and I’m going to be polite about it. He decided it meant all four. He decided it meant none of them. He decided he was a grown man reading punctuation like tea leaves and he ought to be ashamed of himself.

* * *

Tuesday he went to The Brook at seven fifteen.

He had gone to The Brook at seven forty-five every morning for fifteen years. Molly could have set her watch by him. The bell rang when he walked in half an hour early, and Molly looked up from the espresso machine, and looked at the clock, and looked at him.

She filled his travel mug. She handed it back.

“You’re early,” she said.

“Mm.”

Molly wiped the steam wand with far more attention than a steam wand needed. “She usually comes in about ten minutes before you do,” she said, to the steam wand.

He paid. He didn’t answer. Molly didn’t look up, and somehow that was louder than if she had.

He walked back to the store with the coffee burning his hand through the steel and did not look at the window table.

The flowers on the hardware store windowsill were brown.

He stopped on the sidewalk in front of them. Three clay pots. The purple ones, small and delicate, the ones that had started blooming on the September afternoon Allison first walked into the store for wire and ribbon, and had somehow, impossibly, kept on blooming. Right through the first snow. Right through the second. Straight into December, small and stubborn and purple against all that white.

This morning they were brown. Dry and curled in on themselves, like they had given up sometime in the night.

Doug was already inside. He had seen. Shane could tell by how carefully Doug did not mention it when Shane came through the door.

“Cold snap,” Shane said.

“Mm hm,” Doug said. “Real cold snap.”

* * *

He spent Tuesday being useful.

He was very good at it. It was the thing in the world he knew how to do best. He drove out to the Pattersons’ and fixed the pipe under their sink that had started making a sound. He went to Vera Hutchins’ on Birch Street and chipped the ice out of her gutters before it could back up under the shingles, and she stood on her porch in her housecoat and watched him work and said, “You didn’t drive by last night.” He said, “No, ma’am.” She said, “Hm,” in a way that followed him all the way down the ladder. He went back out to the Kowalskis’ to check the pipe he’d fixed on Thanksgiving. It was fine. He checked it anyway. He checked the one next to it.