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Shane, beside her, did the only thing Shane knew how to do in the face of an entire room looking at him. He walked to the counter at a perfectly normal pace as if nothing whatsoever was happening.

She followed him.

Molly was standing behind the register. She had two cups ready on the counter. Shane’s dented travel mug, which he handed over without a word, and next to it, Allison’s wide ceramic mug, already full, already steaming. Molly had not been asked for either one.

Molly filled the travel mug. She set both drinks side by side on the counter, very precisely, touching.

“Morning,” Molly said.

Her voice was so perfectly neutral that Allison could see what it was costing her. Molly’s jaw was actually trembling with the effort.

“Morning,” Shane said.

“Morning,” Allison said.

Nora came out of the kitchen with a tray of cinnamon rolls. She stopped in the doorway. She looked at the two of them standing side by side at her counter, at the travel mug and the ceramic mug touching, at Shane’s hand resting on the counter an inch from Allison’s.

She didn’t smile. Nora didn’t really smile. But something in her whole face settled, like a house settling into its foundation after a long time.

“Well,” Nora said. “Took you long enough.”

Somebody at the back of the room laughed, and then somebody else did, and then the whole room let its breath out at once. Conversation came rushing back in, louder than before, and nobody even pretended they were talking about anything else.

Allison picked up her mug. She took a sip.

She had been drinking Nora’s coffee since August, and it had tasted like a lot of things. Once, on the worst Monday, it had tasted like nothing at all.

This was new.

It was still dark and rich and strong, the way Nora’s coffee always was. But underneath that there was something bright that caught her by surprise at the back of her tongue. Sweet, like brown sugar just beginning to melt. Warm, like a kitchen on a winter morning with the oven already on and the windows fogged. It tasted like waking up and remembering something good a whole second before you remember what it is, and lying there in that second, smiling at nothing. Like woodsmoke caught in the collar of someone else’s flannel. Like a hand at the small of your back in a crowded room. Not pushing. Just there, steady, letting you know it isn’t going anywhere.

It tasted, she realized, like being picked first.

Not the way you get picked when there’s nobody left on the bench. The way you get picked when someone has been looking across the whole gym the entire time, waiting for their turn, already knowing whose name they’re going to say.

Her eyes stung. She held the mug a little tighter so no one would see her hands.

It tasted like the first morning of something. Like the first clean page of a sketchbook, wide open and a little scary. Like a door she had finally walked all the way through.

She looked up at Nora.

“The coffee tastes different today,” she said.

Nora set the tray of cinnamon rolls on the counter and looked back at her with those steady eyes.

“Maybe it’s the water,” Nora said.

* * *

At exactly eight o’clock, Charlie Keller came down Main Street on her bike on her way to school.

She was pedaling hard, her backpack bouncing, her hat pulled down over her ears. She glanced in the window of The Brook the way she always did, just in passing.

She saw them.

Allison watched it happen in slow motion. Charlie’s head snapped around. Her eyes went huge. Her whole body turned toward the window. Her bike did not.

She rode straight into the snowbank in front of the Merrybrook Market.