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Outside the window the snow was blue in the dark. Christmas Eve.

Today, he thought.

He got up and made coffee in his one good mug, and stood at the kitchen window holding it, and did not change his mind.

* * *

Colter Hardware closed at noon on Christmas Eve.

That had been Roy’s rule. So people can go home to whoever they’ve got, Roy used to say, flipping the sign at twelve sharp. Shane had kept the rule for eleven years. For eleven years he had flipped the sign at noon and gone home to Roy’s empty house and a woodstove and a quiet that sounded exactly like one person.

He was thinking about that at eleven fifty-eight, standing at the counter across from Doug.

They did this every year. Neither of them had ever said out loud that it was a tradition. It just was. At two minutes to noon on Christmas Eve, Shane set a small flat box on the counter, and Doug set a small flat box on the counter, and they slid them across to each other without a word.

Shane’s box for Doug held a pen. The same black pen Doug had been using to annotate inventory for twenty-five years, the one with the fine point that made his handwriting look meticulous and illegible at the same time. They didn’t make them in town. Shane ordered them special every November.

Doug’s box for Shane held pencils.

Drafting pencils. Twelve of them, graded hard to soft, the good kind, in a thin tin case. The same pencils Doug had given him every single Christmas since Shane was nineteen years old.

Shane opened the tin and looked at them.

He had used every one. Nineteen tins’ worth. He had worn every pencil Doug ever gave him down to a stub too short to hold.

He had never asked why Doug gave him drafting pencils. Doug had never said.

“You knew,” Shane said.

Doug uncapped his new pen and tried it on the corner of the inventory sheet. A small, perfect, illegible mark.

“You left one on the counter the summer you were nineteen,” Doug said. “A library. The one on Elm Street, with a reading room off the back, all windows, facing the lake.” He capped the pen. “It was good.”

“You never said anything.”

“Wasn’t mine to say.” Doug put the pen in his shirt pocket, where it would stay until next December. He looked at Shane for a moment over the top of his glasses. “You showing her?”

Shane didn’t ask how Doug knew. Doug always knew.

“Today,” he said.

Doug nodded once.

“Good,” he said.

At noon, Shane flipped the sign. For the first time in eleven years, he had somewhere to go.

* * *

He picked her up at one.

She came out onto her porch in her red coat and her snow boots with her hair down under her knit hat, and she looked at the truck, and at him, and her face did the thing it did, the porch light thing, and he felt it hit him in the chest the way it always did.

“Bring your warm gloves,” he said, through the open window. “We’re going out to the lake later.”

She stopped on the top step. “Later? Where are we going first?”

“My house,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”