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“What?”

“North light.” She pointed past him, to the north edge of the clearing, where the old spruce stood tall and dark. “For painting. North light is steady. It doesn’t change all day. No hard shadows, no glare. Painters fight over it.” She looked at the spot. “Right there. A big window. As big as you can make it.”

He looked at the place where she was pointing.

He looked at it for a long time.

He had drawn this house nineteen times, from every side, in every season. He had never once drawn a window on the north wall.

“Okay,” he said.

She smiled at him across the clearing in the gold light. Not the porch light smile. A slower one. The kind you give someone when you both know you’ve just said something bigger than the words.

The sun touched the tops of the mountains on the far side of the lake. The gold went out of the snow all at once, and the blue came up, and the cold dropped the way it did out here at the end of a December day, fast and deep, all the way down into your boots.

And the lake began to sing.

It started far out on the ice. A long, low, whooping sound that bent and slid and dropped, like something enormous calling from underwater. Then another one, closer, higher, ringing across the frozen surface like a plucked wire. Then a deep boom that she felt in her feet. Then a strange, bright, bubbling note that rose up out of the middle of the lake and went sliding off toward the mountains.

She grabbed his arm with both hands.

“What is that?”

“The ice,” he said. “When it gets cold fast, the ice shifts. Stretches. It does that.” He listened to it the way he’d listened to it since he was eight. “Roy told me it was the lake talking. I believed him until I was twelve.”

Another long, eerie note slid across the ice and faded into the trees. She was still holding his arm. Her face was turned out toward the lake, lit blue in the dusk, her lips parted.

“What’s it saying?” she whispered.

He thought about it. He thought about Rory’s records, and Charlie in the snowbank, and every person in Merrybrook who had said it in the last two weeks.

“About time,” he said.

She burst out laughing. The sound went ringing out over the ice, and the lake answered it with one more long, low, singing note, and she laughed harder, and she turned into his arms still laughing, and he held her there in the cold in the middle of a house that didn’t exist yet.

“I’m not asking you anything tonight,” he said into her hat. “It’s too soon to ask the kind of things I want to ask. I just wanted you to see where it goes.”

She pulled back far enough to look up at him.

“Shane,” she said.

“Mm.”

“Draw the window.”

“I will.”

* * *

Margaret Finley had left a basket on Allison’s porch.

It was sitting against the door when they got back to the cottage after dark, covered in a dish towel with a note tucked under the handle in Margaret’s handwriting. You’ll both be hungry. M. Inside was a ham, a dozen of her rolls, a jar of Joseph’s huckleberry jam, and a tin of shortbread.

“How did she know I’d be here,” Shane said.

“Shane,” Allison said. “It’s Merrybrook.”

They ate at her kitchen table with the fire going in the living room. She had a small tree in the corner by the window, a little spruce Ben Keller had cut for her off the ridge, and on it she had strung white lights and exactly one ornament that mattered: a small carved sparrow on a loop of red string.