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At three thirty he was up on the tall ladder in Founders Square stringing lights on the gazebo.

It was his job every December. It had been Roy’s job before it was his. White lights, the old warm kind, not the blue ones Rick kept bringing up at town meetings. He wound them around the posts and along the eaves of the gazebo roof with his gloves gone stiff in the cold and the whole square white and hushed beneath him. He had the lights halfway around the north side when the school let out and the street filled up with kids and noise, and then it emptied again, and then he saw her.

She was coming down Main Street from the school with her bag over her shoulder and her hair down under a knit hat and paint on the side of her hand. He could see the paint from the top of the ladder. Blue, probably. Of course he could see it.

She saw him.

Her whole face changed. It lit up the way it did, like someone flipping on a porch light, and she lifted her hand and waved and started across the street toward the gazebo.

He looked at her.

And he nodded.

One nod. The one he had given her on her first day of school, when she was a stranger.

Then he turned back to the lights.

He heard her footsteps stop in the snow.

He didn’t look. He wound the strand around the next post. He heard her stand there for a moment, only a moment, long enough for him to feel it on the back of his neck. Then he heard her footsteps again, going the other way. Toward Lakeview. Toward home.

His hands stopped working.

He stood at the top of the ladder with a strand of dark lights in his gloves and the cold coming up off the snow, and he hated himself, cleanly and completely, in a way he had not hated himself in a very long time.

That’s space, he told himself. You’re giving her space.

It didn’t sound like space. It sounded like a door closing.

He finished the lights. He plugged them in at dusk, and the gazebo lit up warm and gold against the snow the way it did every year, and three people on the sidewalk stopped to look at it. It was beautiful. He felt nothing at all.

* * *

On Wednesday the chalkboard outside The Brook said Pie of the Day: Chocolate Cream.

He read it on the way past. He didn’t go in. He didn’t need to. Everyone who grew up in Merrybrook knew what chocolate cream meant, the same way they knew the lake froze from the north shore first and that you did not argue with Margaret Finley about garlands.

Chocolate cream was heartbreak.

It wasn’t about him, he told himself. Somebody else in town was having a hard week. It was a town of two thousand people. It could be anybody.

It was him. He knew it was him.

Doug didn’t look up when he came in. That lasted until about ten o’clock.

“Molly says you changed your coffee time,” Doug said, to the inventory sheet.

Shane stopped walking.

“Does everyone in this town report to you?”

“Yes,” Doug said simply, and went back to his inventory.

* * *

Harold Finley came in at eleven twenty.

He came in the way he always came in, which was the way weather arrived. Slow and certain and without explanation. He nodded at Doug. He nodded at Shane. He went to the fastener wall without asking where anything was, because he had known where everything in this store was since before Shane was born, and he stood there looking at the machine screws with his hands clasped behind his back.