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“I’ve been here a day and a half.”

“That’s usually enough to form an impression.”

She thought about the coffee. The book that had fallen at Thistle & Ink. The tea tray outside her door. The way the town had felt, this morning, like something she’d been trying to remember the name of.

“It feels...” She stopped. Started again. “Like a place that knows what it is.”

Rory’s expression shifted into something that was part satisfaction and part the look of someone who has been waiting for someone else to notice a thing they’ve known for a long time. “That’s a good way to put it.” They flagged Molly down for coffee and opened the canvas bag and began, without self-consciousness, to arrange a small collection of notebooks on the table between them as though settling in for a while. “Where are you from originally?”

She told them. Rory asked questions, good ones, the kind that suggested they were genuinely interested in the answers rather than filling time, and somewhere in the second cup of coffee Allison stopped feeling like a newcomer being politely interviewed and started feeling like she was talking to someone who was simply interested in people and had decided she was worth being interested in.

“Tell me about the town,” she said eventually. “The history.”

Molly, passing with a coffee pot, slowed slightly.

Rory’s eyes lit up.

“I’ll give you the short version,” Rory said, in the tone of someone for whom no version was particularly short. “Merrybrook was settled in the 1880s, started as a logging camp and a trading post, basically, men following the timber up into the valley. The lake was already named by then. Clearwater. You can guess why.” Rory pulled a notebook from the pile and opened it to a hand-drawn map that looked like it had been done with real care. “The valley was harder to get to than most, still is, as you probably noticed, so it grew slowly. The families who stayed were the ones who meant to.”

“The Colters,” said Nora Hart, from somewhere behind the counter.

Rory pointed in her direction without looking. “Among others. The Colters, the Harts, the Finleys, the Larsons. Those are your founding families.” They tapped the map. “Roy Colter built the hardware store in 1958. His father before him ran a supply operation out of the same location going back to the 1920s. Roy just made it permanent.”

“Roy Colter,” Allison repeated. The name had a weight to it, she noticed, the way names did in small towns when they’d been said together with the same place for long enough to become inseparable from it. “Does he still...”

“Roy passed,” Nora said. “About twelve years ago.”

“His grandson runs the store now,” Rory said. “Shane.” The name landed simply, without particular emphasis, the way you said the name of something that was just there, the mountain, the lake, the hardware store, Shane. “He’s lived here his whole life. Third generation.”

Allison looked out the window at the hardware store sign across the square. Colter Hardware. Est. 1958.

“What’s he like?” she asked, because it seemed like a natural question.

Across the table, Rory considered this with the seriousness it apparently deserved. “Competent,” they said finally.

From behind the counter, Nora made a sound that was not quite a laugh.

“He’s...” Rory searched for the right word. “He’s the kind of person a town relies on without realizing it’s relying on him. If something needs doing, Shane does it. If something breaks, Shane fixes it. Half the buildings on Main Street have something in them that he’s repaired at some point, and he’s never mentioned it to anyone.” A pause. “He’s not particularly easy to get to know.”

“The town loves him,” Nora said, refilling Allison’s coffee without being asked. “He just makes it difficult for them.”

Allison looked at the hardware store again.

Through the window she could see, just barely, a figure moving behind the glass, too far away to make out clearly, just movement, a shape against the interior. She watched for a moment and then looked away.

“What about the town itself?” she said. “Rory. You said the families who stayed were the ones who meant to. But there have been others who came?”

Rory’s expression did something interesting. “Always. People come through Merrybrook fairly regularly, all things considered, given how hard it is to find.” A pause. “Some of them leave.”

“And some of them don’t,” Molly said, appearing from nowhere to refill Rory’s cup.

“You make it sound like the town has opinions about it,” Allison said.

The table was quiet. Molly and Rory exchanged a look she couldn’t quite read.

“Every town has a personality,” Rory said carefully. “Merrybrook’s happens to be...” Another pause. “Retentive.”

Nora, from the counter: “Rory.”