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“There was a cat,” she said.

“A cat.”

“Orange. It led me in. I think it’s Claire’s.”

He looked at her for a long, long moment.

“Claire doesn’t have a cat,” he said.

Allison decided, once again, that she would think about that later.

He stood and held out his hand, and she took it, and he led her back through the spruce the right way, the way he’d been walking since he was eight years old. Their two sets of prints wound through the snow side by side.

Neither of them looked back. If they had, they would have seen a single small purple flower at the very edge of the granite shelf, right where the snow met the ice, where two hours earlier there had been nothing but ice.

The lake stayed perfectly still.

* * *

Shane

The flowers on the windowsill were purple.

He stopped on the sidewalk in front of the hardware store at seven fifty. All three clay pots. Small and delicate and purple against the snow, blooming like they had never once stopped.

He looked at them for a while.

Inside, Doug was at the counter. The coffee was already made. A cup was already sitting at Shane’s end of the counter, steaming. Doug didn’t look up from his inventory sheet.

“Cold snap’s over,” Doug said.

Shane stood in the doorway with snow melting off his boots.

“You left the counter,” he said.

“Once. In twenty-five years.”

“You told her about the lake.”

“I did.”

The store was quiet. The furnace ticked. Shane looked at the man who had been standing behind that counter since Shane was thirteen years old, who had seen him through Roy’s last hard year and through every careful, useful, lonely year after that, and never once said a word about any of it.

“Thank you,” Shane said.

Doug nodded once. Shane’s own nod, handed back to him. He turned a page.

“Aisle four is level,” Doug said. “Leave it alone.”

* * *

At noon, walking back from a job, he passed The Brook.

Molly was out front in her apron with a rag in her hand, wiping down the chalkboard. She saw him. She didn’t say a word. She just wiped away the last of Chocolate Cream, gave him one long look, and went back inside, and left the board blank.

* * *

The house at the end of Pine Street had been Roy’s.