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“I’ll find out. I have a very particular set of skills. I teach fourth grade.”

Allison laughed, and it came out wet.

Lauren poured the wine into two coffee mugs because neither of them wanted to go inside for glasses. She handed one over and was quiet for a while, looking at the lake through the gap in the spruce trees.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Listen to me. That man has looked at you like you hung the moon since August. Men like Shane don’t cool off. They don’t get bored. They get scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“I don’t know, babe. But something happened between Saturday and Tuesday, and it wasn’t nothing.” Lauren looked at her. “Did anything happen?”

Allison thought about it. The cinnamon roll. The phone. The table.

“He asked me if I was okay,” she said slowly. “At The Brook. Right after Ryan texted. And I said I was fine.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

Lauren looked at her over the rim of her coffee mug of wine.

“Huh,” Lauren said.

* * *

On Wednesday he didn’t come to The Brook at all.

She was at her table at seven thirty-five, the way she had been every weekday morning for weeks. She had never once admitted to herself that she timed it so she’d already be sitting there when he walked in at seven forty-five. She was admitting it now, watching the clock go past seven forty-five, past seven fifty, past eight, and the bell over the door never ringing for him.

Molly refilled her coffee without being asked.

“He came in at seven fifteen yesterday,” Molly said, to the coffee pot. “Hasn’t been in today.”

Allison looked at her mug.

Then Nora set a plate down beside it. A slice of pie. Dark and glossy, piled with cream.

“Pie?” Allison said. “It’s eight in the morning.”

“Some mornings call for it,” Nora said.

Allison looked at the chalkboard by the register. Pie of the Day: Chocolate Cream.

She had lived in Merrybrook long enough now to know better than to ask what a pie was. She asked anyway.

“What does chocolate cream mean?”

Nora looked at her with those steady eyes that had been watching this room for forty years.

“Heartbreak,” Nora said. And then, after a moment, more gently: “The fixable kind. Mostly.”

She went back to the counter.

Allison ate the pie. It was rich and dark and sweet, and underneath all of that it tasted like standing outside a door you weren’t sure you were allowed to knock on.

* * *

She walked past the hardware store after school.