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She laughed. “You’re going to say it every morning?”

“I said I would.”

“You don’t say things you’re not sure of.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

Her phone buzzed on the counter. Becca. A video call.

Allison looked at the phone. She looked at Shane. She looked down at herself in his flannel with her hair everywhere.

“Answer it,” he said.

“She’s going to scream.”

“Answer it anyway.”

She answered it.

Becca’s face filled the screen, in pajamas, in front of a Christmas tree, with Kevin waving somewhere behind her. “MERRY CHRISTMAS,” Becca yelled, and then stopped. Her eyes narrowed. She leaned closer to her camera.

“Allison,” she said slowly. “Whose shirt is that.”

Behind Allison, Shane lifted his crooked mug in a small, polite salute.

Becca screamed.

* * *

Shane

The store was closed on Christmas Day. It always had been.

He walked past it anyway, a little after three, on the way to Margaret’s. Allison was beside him in her red coat with her hand in his. The town was quiet the way it only ever got on Christmas afternoon. Every window on Main Street lit. Smoke rising straight up from every chimney into a pale gold sky. The snow on the sidewalks untouched except for their two sets of footprints and one small running set that almost certainly belonged to Charlie.

He had meant to say it this morning. The name. He had lain awake at five with it sitting right there, ready, and he had turned to her and said Merry Christmas, and then she had looked at him and said three words that knocked every other word he had right out of him.

He had not minded.

He stopped in front of Colter Hardware and looked up at the sign.

Colter Hardware. Est. 1958.

Roy’s letters. Painted in this same spot by a man who had just decided that this was a thing he was going to do, and do for good. Shane had repainted it once, at twenty-five, matching every curve and stroke so exactly that three different people told him it looked the same. That had been the point. Nobody was supposed to be able to tell.

The top right corner was faded again. The afternoon sun did that. He had been meaning to repaint it for three years.

He had always read that sign as a promise. This is a thing we do. We have been doing it. We will keep doing it. Roy’s promise to the town. And when Roy was gone it became Shane’s promise, whether he’d wanted it or not. He had stood under it for fifteen years and he had kept it, every single day. Every pipe and window and porch railing. He had kept it the way you carry something heavy up a long hill, because it has to get to the top and there’s nobody else to carry it.

He looked up at it now, in the Christmas light, with her hand in his.

He waited for the weight. It always came. It had come every morning for fifteen years, the moment the key turned in the lock.

It didn’t come.

He thought about Roy. About a man who had built a store so the people of this valley would have somewhere to get what they needed. Who had wired the switch box for the tree, and bought twelve acres on the north shore for four hundred dollars, and cut a notch in a spruce so a little boy would know where to turn. Who had stood in a kitchen with sawdust on his shirt and said the thing out loud.

Roy hadn’t built all of it so Shane would have to carry it.