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Then she opened the sketchbook to the first page and drew the gap in the spruce trees, the water going gold, the mountains going purple at the edges. It wasn’t much. It was page one.
The lake held the light until the sun was gone, and she sat there until it was dark, and she did not feel like a stranger.
Not once.
Chapter 4
Coffee, Everywhere
She was on day three and had developed, without entirely meaning to, a routine.
It wasn’t much of one yet (she hadn’t been here long enough for anything to properly calcify into habit) but there was the shape of one forming, the way shapes formed in new places when you let them: the kitchen window at the cottage in the early morning, standing with her first cup of coffee while the mist was still on the lake through the gap in the spruce trees, the water doing that silver thing it did before the sun fully arrived. The walk down Lakeview Lane to Main Street, the trees making their breathing sound overhead. The bell over the door at The Brook and the ceramic mug that appeared on the counter before she’d finished deciding she wanted it.
She was getting to like that. The mug appearing. The not having to ask.
She was at the counter getting her coffee (Molly had handed it to her and turned away before Allison had finished her first word) and she was thinking about the classroom and the supply closet situation and what Lauren had said about the watercolors being hidden in the cabinet above the sink, and she was thinking about what kind of first project she wanted to do with the kids when school started, something accessible, something that didn’t require three weeks of prep but still felt like art and not just an activity, something that could...
She turned away from the counter.
A man turned away from the counter at the same moment, from the other direction, and the world briefly rearranged itself.
She registered things in the wrong order, the way you did when your brain was processing faster than it could organize: the coffee leaving her cup in a wide, graceful, terrible arc. The coffee arriving on a dark flannel shirt. The sharp controlled intake of breath from the man she had walked into. The cup, somehow still in her hand. Empty.
She looked up.
He was tall, tall enough that looking up was a genuine physical necessity and not a figure of speech, with dark hair that was slightly unruly in a way that looked like it had simply given up being anything else, and broad shoulders that her coffee was currently running down in rivulets.
Not gym shoulders. She had lived in a city full of men who built themselves in front of mirrors, and she knew the difference. These were the shoulders of a man who carried heavy things for a living, year after year, until the weight had built him instead of the other way around. Thick through the chest. Solid all the way down. Big, capable hands.
His face took a moment to land on her. It wasn’t striking in the way that immediately striking men were, the kind you noticed from across a room because they wanted to be noticed. This was something different. The kind of face that got better the longer you looked at it, that gave you more the more attention you paid it, that she had a feeling would be very difficult to stop paying attention to once you started.
She was going to stop thinking about his face because she had just put hot coffee on it. On him. On his shirt.
He looked down at his shirt.
He looked at her.
His expression gave away nothing. Not angry (she braced instinctively for angry, she had walked into a man and ruined his morning and she had earned angry) but neutral in a way that was somehow worse than angry would have been. The careful blankness of someone who had decided not to react and had been making that decision long enough that it came naturally.
She noticed his hand, the one that wasn’t holding his travel mug. It had come up instinctively when they’d collided, an automatic reach to steady something, and had arrived too late for anything useful, and was now just there, suspended slightly, before he lowered it back to his side with the deliberate calm of a man putting something away.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t... I turned around and I didn’t look and I’m so sorry, I can... do you have, let me get napkins...”
“It’s fine,” he said.
His voice was low and even and unhurried. The voice of a man who didn’t raise it.
In a tone that did not mean fine.
“I’m really sorry,” she said again, because apparently she was going to say it a third time, and possibly a fourth, because the coffee had been hot and she had put it on a person and there was no version of this that was fine regardless of what he said. “I wasn’t looking where I was going, I should always look, I’m... I’m new here, I’m still figuring out the... I’m so sorry...”
“It’s fine,” he said again. Same tone. Same careful evenness.
She stopped talking.
She became very aware, in the hyperawareness of acute embarrassment, of small things: the weight of the empty mug in her hand. The sound of The Brook around them, the low hum of other conversations that had not paused for this moment, Merrybrook going about its morning completely indifferent to her catastrophe. The faint smell of the coffee she’d just wasted, rising between them.
The paint on her left hand. She’d noticed it this morning and meant to scrub it before she went out and hadn’t, cobalt blue along the outside of her palm, marking her as clearly as a name tag. Art teacher. Obviously.
