Page 129

goodnight 😊

She put her phone in her pocket, and caught up to him, and took his hand. They walked home through the snow, and behind them, the whole of Merrybrook stayed lit.

* * *

On Tuesday, the last day before break, the light changed.

It happened at a quarter past three, after the last of the kids had gone out the door with their paper snowflakes and their glitter and their mittens on the wrong hands. Allison was wiping down the tables when the sun came in low across the playground and turned the snow a color she didn’t have a name for yet, not white and not gold, and the shadows of the swings lay across it in long bars of the exact blue Sophie had found on her own.

She stood there with the sponge in her hand until it was gone.

She knew, then, how the first one went. The winter one. The ice at the edge of the lake and the dark open water beyond it and that blue in every place the light couldn’t reach. She had been sketching it every morning for a month, and it had been circling, and now it had landed, and if she didn’t get it onto canvas tonight she would lose it the way you lost a dream by talking about it over breakfast.

Which was a problem, because tonight was Shane’s.

They had made the plan on Sunday, and it was a good plan. Dinner at The Brook at six, Nora’s Tuesday chowder, and then back to her couch for whatever came after The Brook, which lately had been a movie neither of them watched.

She walked down Main Street at four with her hands in her coat pockets, practicing.

She was not going to say sorry. She had decided that somewhere around the market. She wasn’t sorry. She was a grown woman who wanted to paint, and wanting to paint was not a crime against anyone, and she had spent a long time apologizing for wanting her own evenings. By the time she reached the hardware store she had said it to herself six different ways without the word sorry in any of them.

Doug looked up when the bell rang, looked at her face, and remembered something urgent in the back room.

Shane was behind the counter. The look he gave her when he saw her still undid her a little, every single time.

“About tonight,” she said.

She watched it happen. Something in him went still, not all at once, the way a pond goes still. She could see the old reflex arriving. The nod. The it’s fine. The whole quiet machinery of a man stepping back so nobody would have to watch him be disappointed. She had seen it once before, from the sidewalk in Founders Square with him at the top of a ladder, and she had not known then what she was looking at.

She waited. So did he.

Then he set down his pen.

“What do you need?” he said.

She had practiced everything except the answer to that.

“I need to paint tonight,” she said. “The first lake. The winter one. I saw the light on the playground an hour ago and I know how it goes now, and if I don’t start tonight I’ll talk myself out of it.” She took a breath. “I need a few hours where nobody needs anything from me. And then I would really like to see you.”

No sorry. Not one. She was almost proud of herself.

He looked at her for a moment. Not the stillness now. The other look, the one that meant he was measuring something so he could build it right.

“Eight?” he said.

“Eight.”

“I’ll bring dinner.” A pause. “Can I stay after? I won’t talk.”

She thought about it honestly, because he had asked honestly. A room with him in it, not needing anything from her.

“You can stay,” she said. “You can’t look at it.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it. Not until it’s done.”

“I heard you.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Eight.”