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“It’s for you,” she said.

Allison took it the way you’d take something that might tear. Carefully. With both hands.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s going on my refrigerator. Right in the middle. Where I’ll see it every single morning.”

Sophie nodded, satisfied, and went to get her coat. At the door she stopped and looked back.

“You looked sad this week,” Sophie said. “You don’t anymore.”

Then she was gone, out into the snow with the others, and Allison sat alone at her desk with a drawing in her hands and her face on fire and a smile she could not put away, and she was very glad there was nobody left in the room to see it.

Chapter 28

Hold Still

The Merrybrook tree lighting was Saturday at six.

She had heard about it since November in the way she heard about most things in Merrybrook, as though it were a law of nature. The tree lighting was Saturday at six. The lake froze from the north shore. You did not argue with Margaret Finley about garlands.

Shane picked her up at five thirty. He knocked on her door instead of texting from the truck, and when she opened it he was standing on her porch in his good flannel with his jacket open and snow in his hair, and he looked at her in her red coat with her hair down under her knit hat, and he didn’t say anything for long enough that she started to laugh.

“What.”

“Nothing,” he said. He didn’t look away.

They walked.

Founders Square was already full when they got there. The whole town was there. She understood now that when Merrybrook said the whole town, it meant it. The tree stood in the center of the square beside the gazebo, a tall silver spruce that someone had brought down from the ridge, dark and unlit and dusted with snow. The gazebo stood dark beside it with Shane’s white lights strung along every post and eave, waiting.

Nora and Molly had set up a table in front of The Brook with two enormous pots of cocoa and a line twenty people deep. Joseph was at the next table handing out gingerbread from a basket, big soft squares of it, dark and spiced, and Allison noticed that every person who took a bite went quiet for just a second afterward, their faces going somewhere far away and warm, before they came back and kept talking. She didn’t ask. She had stopped asking.

She took a piece. It tasted like being seven years old on Christmas Eve, lying awake in the dark listening for something wonderful.

She stood there for a second with her eyes closed.

When she opened them, Earl was standing in front of her in his flannel vest, holding out something small in his big rough hand.

“Made you something,” he said, and went pink around the ears.

It was a carved wooden ornament on a loop of red string. A sparrow. Smaller than the one on her kitchen table, but the same bird, the same careful little wings.

“So the one on your table has some company,” Earl said.

She couldn’t say anything. She hugged him instead, and he patted her back twice, awkwardly, and said, “Ah, well,” and disappeared into the crowd before she could see his face.

She stood there holding the little sparrow.

Shane was watching her.

“Earl’s never made anybody an ornament,” he said quietly.

“How do you know?”

“Because I’d have heard about it,” he said. “This is Merrybrook.”

* * *

Everyone was there.