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Not calm. Still. The open water past the ice lay flat as glass, not one ripple, holding the silver sky and the white mountains perfectly upside down, as if the whole lake had stopped breathing to listen.

“Allison,” he said.

“Don’t,” she said softly. “Don’t say it like that unless you mean it.”

“I had a whole speech,” he said. “I’ve been practicing it out here for two hours. Out loud. Like a fool.”

“I heard you,” she said. “I couldn’t make out the words.”

He turned toward her on the cold granite.

“I don’t know what this is,” he said. “I want it to be something. I want it to be everything. I should have told you that a long time ago, instead of fixing your cabinet.”

She laughed, crying. “I liked the cabinet.”

“I know. But a cabinet was never going to say it for me.” He took a breath. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She looked at him. Really looked. At the chestnut eyes gone soft in the gray light. At the frost on his shoulders and the stubble on his jaw and his cheeks gone red from the cold. At the face she had been looking at since August.

“Neither am I,” she said.

And for once, he didn’t wait for her to go first.

He reached for her with both hands and took her face between them, warm even through the cold, and kissed her like a man who had been practicing to a frozen lake for two hours and had finally figured out the only thing he actually needed to say. She grabbed the front of his jacket. The sun came up over the eastern ridge and caught the tops of the mountains and set them on fire, pink and gold, and neither of them saw it.

When he finally pulled back, he left his forehead against hers.

“What time is it,” she whispered.

He glanced at his watch. “Seven twenty.”

“I have twenty-two kids at eight fifteen.”

He laughed.

Out loud. Not the quiet, surprised half laugh she’d pulled out of him once at the festival, the one she’d tucked away like a carved sparrow. This was all of it. It rang out across the frozen shore and bounced back off the trees, and he looked almost startled by it, and she thought she would happily spend the rest of her life trying to make that sound happen again.

“Soup,” he said, when he’d stopped. “Tonight. If the offer’s still open.”

“The offer was for people who aren’t busy with inventory.”

“Inventory’s done.”

“In November, I hear.”

His mouth moved into the smile. The whole one. “Come to mine,” he said.

She stared at him. In four months she had never once heard anyone in Merrybrook mention Shane Colter’s house. She had honestly started to wonder if he slept at the hardware store.

“Your house?”

“Nobody’s really been in it,” he said. “Not since Roy.”

“I found your secret fishing spot in the dark,” she said. “I think I can handle your house.”

He tilted his head. “How did you find it? Doug’s never even been out here.”

She hesitated.