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“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s mine,” he said.

Her eyes filled.

“Roy had a name for my grandmother,” he said. “Just one. Nobody else ever used it. Not her family. Not her friends. Just him.” He looked up at the sign, then back at her. “Doug told me Roy said that was how he knew it was real. When her name in his mouth started sounding different from everybody else’s.”

She put her free hand over her mouth.

“When,” she said through her fingers. “When did you start?”

“In my head? October. Somewhere around the festival.” He paused. “Out loud? Once. At the store. In front of Charlie.”

She lowered her hand and stared at him.

“Charlie Keller,” she said slowly, “has known this for three weeks?”

“Yes.”

“And she hasn’t told a single person?”

“No.”

“Charlie Keller. Who rode into a snowbank.”

“Yes.”

She laughed. She was crying and laughing at the same time, standing on the sidewalk under his grandfather’s sign in the Christmas light, and she pressed her face into the front of his jacket and he felt her shaking.

“That,” she said, muffled, “is the most restraint anyone in this entire town has ever shown.”

“I know,” he said into her hair. “I was impressed.”

When she lifted her face, it was wet and pink and shining.

“Say it again,” she said.

He looked at her. At the woman who had turned around at The Brook in August and walked straight into him. Who had stood at the edge of the trees in the dark and said inventory, and stood in a clearing and asked for a north window, and lain in her bed that morning and said it first.

“Allie,” he said.

And she looked up at him like she had been waiting her whole life to be called something that was just his.

Somewhere down the street, a door opened, and he heard Margaret Finley’s voice calling out to someone that dinner was at four, not four fifteen, and she meant four.

Every window on Main Street was lit. Every chimney was smoking. Down the block, Margaret’s porch light was on, and inside that house there was a long table and a ham and a dozen rolls and Harold and Doug and Lauren and Rory and whoever else in Merrybrook had nowhere else to be on Christmas. Which meant everyone. Which meant family.

He squeezed her hand.

“Come on, Allie,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

Epilogue

Not Where You Were Headed

The following October.