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The entire Brook turned to the window.

There was a long moment in which there was nothing to see but a bicycle wheel spinning in the air above a mound of snow.

Then Charlie popped straight up out of the snowbank, covered head to toe in white, hat gone, hair full of snow. She looked right through the window at Allison and Shane.

She gave them two thumbs up.

The whole room applauded.

Shane closed his eyes.

“This town,” he said quietly.

“This town,” Allison agreed, and she was laughing so hard she had to put her mug down.

* * *

He walked her to school.

It was only three blocks. They walked them through the snow with their shoulders touching, past Thistle & Ink with the wreath on the door, past Sweetgrass where Joseph was in the window arranging a tray of gingerbread and paused to raise one enormous hand at them in greeting, past Colter Hardware, where Doug was standing at the counter and lifted his coffee cup in their direction without any change of expression whatsoever.

“The light’s Naples yellow,” she said, mostly to herself.

“It’s twenty degrees and sunny.”

“That’s not a color.”

“It’s the color of twenty degrees and sunny,” he said, and she laughed the rest of the way to the school steps.

“Doug’s smiling,” Allison said.

“Doug doesn’t smile.”

“He’s smiling at his coffee cup.”

Shane glanced at the window. Doug was, in fact, smiling at his coffee cup.

“Huh,” Shane said.

At the school doors he stopped. Helen Marsh was standing in the front hallway talking to a parent. She saw them through the glass. She didn’t stop talking to the parent. She just raised her eyebrows, very slowly, all the way up.

“I should go in,” Allison said.

“You should.”

Neither of them moved.

“Shane.”

“I’m going,” he said. He was not going.

She laughed and went up on her toes and kissed him quickly, right there in front of the glass doors of Merrybrook Elementary, and she heard a gasp from somewhere inside that was almost certainly a third grader.

“Go,” she said.

He went. She watched him walk back down the street toward the hardware store with his hands in his jacket pockets, and she was still smiling when she pushed the doors open and walked past Helen, who said, “Good morning, Ms. Hayes,” in a voice so dry it could have started a fire.

* * *