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Allison walked through the middle.

She climbed the gazebo steps. Her legs were shaking and it wasn’t the cold. She stood beside him at the old switch box, and he took her hand and put it on the lever, and covered it with his.

“Roy lit the first one,” he said, low, just for her. “Figured this one ought to be ours.”

She looked up at him. At the chestnut eyes and the snow in his dark hair and the face she had been looking at since August, that had gotten better every single time.

“Okay,” she whispered.

They pulled the lever together.

The lights came on.

All of them, all at once. The tall spruce blazed up gold from its roots to its crown. The gazebo lit up around them, every post and every eave, Shane’s warm white lights glowing against the snow. The whole square went bright, and every face in the square turned up golden in the light, and a sound went up from the crowd that she felt in her chest.

And it started to snow.

It had not been snowing. The sky had been clear and full of stars ten seconds earlier. Now soft, fat flakes came drifting down out of nowhere into the light, slow and quiet, landing on the tree and the gazebo and the crowd and in Shane’s hair.

She looked up at it.

When she looked back down, he was looking at her.

He put his hand at her jaw, warm in the cold, the way he had in the snow outside this same square a lifetime ago, and he kissed her.

In front of everyone.

In front of the whole town, at the top of the gazebo steps, under the lights his grandfather wired and he strung, in the falling snow.

There was one second of complete silence.

And then, from somewhere near the front of the crowd, in a voice that could have cracked the ice on Clearwater Lake:

“FINALLY!”

Charlie Keller.

The entire square exploded.

People cheered. Lauren whooped so loudly that Ben Keller turned and stared at her. Margaret Finley burst into tears and elbowed Harold in the ribs, and Harold said, “Hm,” and nodded once at Shane like he was approving a finished piece of carpentry.

Doug did not clap. Doug stood by the cocoa table with his cup in both hands, and smiled down into it like it had told him something wonderful.

Shane pulled back and looked at the crowd, and his ears went bright red. She saw it. She was going to tease him about it for the rest of his life.

“This town,” he said.

“This town,” she said.

* * *

“Hold still,” Rory said. “Both of you. Don’t move.”

Rory had come up the steps with the camera. They turned Allison and Shane gently by the shoulders and stepped back and looked at them, then moved them six inches to the left, and then another two, until they were standing on the gazebo steps directly in front of the old post with the switch box.

Allison realized, with a strange feeling in her chest, where she was standing.

In October, she had stood at the fence at the edge of this square and looked at seventy years of photographs. The same gazebo. The same maple. Different people standing in the same place. And a photo from 1963 of a man with broad shoulders and a stillness about him, standing exactly here.