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He was going to walk into The Brook at seven forty-five. His usual time. The time Molly had made very clear, without quite saying it, that Allison had been quietly arranging her mornings around. He was going to sit down at her table without being asked, and he was going to say it. He didn’t know yet exactly what it was. So he practiced, out loud, quietly, to a frozen lake, like a fool.

I shouldn’t have said busy.

No.

I saw you turn your phone over and I

No.

I don’t know what this is. I want it to be something. I want it to be everything. I should have told you that a long time ago.

Closer.

He sat on the cold granite with his hands tucked under his arms and said it again, and it sounded a little less foolish the second time, and a little less the third. He had been sitting there almost two hours, and the sky had finally begun turning from black to the deep blue that came before the gray, when somewhere behind him in the trees a branch cracked.

He went still.

Footsteps. In the snow. Coming slowly down the narrow way through the spruce that nobody used, the way that wasn’t a path at all unless you had been walking it since you were eight years old.

Nobody came here. Nobody had ever come here. Not once in thirty years.

He turned around.

She was standing at the edge of the trees with snow up to her ankles and a thermos in one hand, her sketchbook tucked under her arm, her knit hat pulled down over her ears and her cheeks bright red from the cold. She was breathing a little hard from the walk. She was looking right at him.

She did not look like someone who had gotten lost.

She looked like someone who had come to find him.

She held his eyes for a long moment in the blue dark. Then she lifted her chin, just slightly, the way she did when she had decided to say something true.

“Inventory,” she said.

Chapter 25

Busy Week

She told Helen on Monday.

She hadn’t planned to. She walked out of The Brook with a cinnamon roll in her stomach and a number blocked in her phone and the whole bright cold morning feeling like it had been handed back to her, and her feet carried her past her own classroom, down the main hallway, and straight into the principal’s office before her brain had a chance to weigh in.

Helen looked up from her desk. “Allison. Good morning.”

“I want to renew my contract,” Allison said.

Helen blinked.

“For next year,” Allison said. “And the year after that, if you’ll have me. I know it’s early. I know the board doesn’t meet until January. I just needed to say it out loud to somebody who could write it down.”

Helen set down her pen. She looked at Allison with the complicated face of a principal who had watched a lot of teachers come to Merrybrook for one year and leave after one year, and a mother whose quiet daughter now talked about art class at dinner.

“The board meets the second Tuesday in January,” Helen said. “Consider it done.”

She wrote something on a sticky note and pressed it to the edge of her monitor, and Allison walked back down the hallway feeling like she had just planted something in the ground and heard it take root.

She taught all day in a kind of glow. Marcus finished the ice at the edges of his lake. Sophie stayed in at recess and wouldn’t let anyone see what she was drawing, but she hummed while she did it, which Allison had never once heard her do.

At six forty that evening, standing in her kitchen, she texted Shane.