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After dinner she handed him a box.

It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with the same deep orange ribbon she’d used on the festival arch. He recognized it and didn’t say so. He untied it slowly, because she was watching him, and because he’d never much known what to do with his hands when someone gave him something.

Inside was a mug.

Handmade. Heavy. A deep speckled brown glaze, almost exactly the brown of his one good mug at home. Almost. Not quite. The handle leaned just slightly to the left, and there was a thumbprint pressed into the clay at the base of it, right where his thumb would go.

“I made it,” she said. “At school. In the kiln, on the last day before break. It’s not perfect. The handle’s crooked.” She was talking fast, the way she did when she was nervous. “I know you don’t like things crooked. I thought about doing it again, but I...”

“Allison.”

She stopped.

He turned the mug over. On the bottom, scratched into the clay before it was fired, in her handwriting, was one small letter. S.

“Now you own three,” she said softly.

He looked at the mug in his hands for a long time.

“Two good ones,” he said. “And one that’s taken.”

He stood and set it on her counter, next to her own mug, the chipped blue one she’d brought with her from the city. He set them side by side. Close enough to touch.

Then he went out to the truck and came back with a flat package wrapped in plain paper, and handed it to her.

She opened it. Inside was a frame. Dark walnut, rich and warm, the grain running through it like water. The corners fitted so tight you couldn’t see the joins. It was empty.

“Roy had a walnut board in the back of the workshop for thirty years,” he said. “He was saving it for something that mattered. He never decided what.” He cleared his throat. “I decided.”

She ran her fingertip along the edge of it. She looked up at him, confused.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “What’s it for?”

He crossed her kitchen to the refrigerator.

Sophie’s drawing was there, right in the middle where Allison had promised it would be, held up by a magnet shaped like a paint palette. Main Street in the snow. The Brook glowing gold on one side, Colter Hardware on the other. Blue shadows. Two small figures between them.

He took it down very carefully. He brought it back to the table and took the frame out of her hands and slid the drawing in behind the glass.

It fit exactly.

She stared at it. Then at him.

“You measured it,” she said.

“Last Sunday,” he said. “You were in the shower.”

She laughed. She was also crying a little, and trying to pretend she wasn’t, and failing.

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a single nail.

“Of course you have a nail,” she said, laughing harder.

“I always have a nail.”

He hung it on the wall above her kitchen table. Above the carved sparrow and the dried flower crown and the book about courage that had fallen off a shelf at Thistle & Ink. He checked it with his eye. He moved it a quarter inch. He stepped back.

It was level.