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He woke her before dawn.

Not with an alarm. With a hand on her shoulder and his voice low in the dark, the way he’d woken her a hundred times since last Christmas. “Allie. Come on. You’ll want to see this.”

“It’s five in the morning,” she said into the pillow.

“It’s the festival.”

“The festival starts at noon.”

“I know,” he said. “Come on anyway.”

She had learned by now that when Shane Colter said come on anyway, there was always a reason, and it was always worth it. So she got up in the dark in Roy’s house on Pine Street, which had been her house too since June, and pulled on her jeans and his old flannel over her sweater, and padded out to the kitchen, where the woodstove was already going and the coffee was already made.

There were two chairs by the woodstove now.

He had built the second one in March. He hadn’t said a word about it. She had just come home from school one afternoon and found it there, beside Roy’s old chair, the wood still smelling of sawdust and oil, the arms worn smooth by his hands before she’d ever sat in it. She had stood in the doorway and cried, and he had pretended not to notice, which was its own kind of love.

On the shelf above the chairs, next to the photo of Roy and a small boy with a fishing rod much too big for him, sat a carved wooden sparrow and a dried flower crown and a book about courage that had fallen off a shelf at Thistle & Ink. On the kitchen wall hung Sophie’s drawing in its walnut frame. On the counter, side by side, touching, sat a chipped blue mug from the city and a speckled brown one with a handle that leaned a little to the left.

He handed her the blue one, full and hot and exactly the way she liked it.

“I love you,” he said.

He had said it every single morning for ten months. He had not missed one.

“I love you,” she said. “It’s still five in the morning.”

His mouth moved into the smile. The whole one. She got it more often now. She had never once stopped keeping count.

“Get your boots,” he said.

* * *

The north road was dark and empty, the headlights making a small gold tunnel through the trees. He parked at the pullout where his truck had been parked every morning of his life, and they walked in together through the old spruce. Past Roy’s notch in the bark. Past the granite shelf above the water. Up the short slope to the clearing.

The house was there.

Not finished. Not close to finished. But there. The stone base had gone in during May, gray granite from the ridge fitted so tight it looked like it had grown up out of the ground. The timber frame had gone up over the summer, raised by Shane and Doug and Ben Keller and half the men in Merrybrook on one long August weekend that had ended with a potluck in the clearing and Joseph’s pie on a sawhorse. The roof was on now, low and long and hunkered down against the weather, exactly like the drawings. It looked like it had always been there. Like the lake had made room for it.

Most of the windows were still empty frames, dark squares with plastic sheeting stapled across them against the coming winter.

Except one.

On the north wall, the first and only window he had put in. Tall and wide, as big as the wall would hold. North light. For painting. The glass had gone in two weeks ago, and he had not let her come out to see it until now. Four canvases of the lake were leaning against her kitchen wall at the cottage, winter and spring and summer and the October one still wet, and she knew without asking that there was room for every one of them under that window. He would have measured.

And across the front of the house, facing the water, the porch.

He had finished the porch before anything else. The boards were new and pale in the dark. And sitting on it, side by side, facing the lake, were two chairs.

He had built those too.

She stood at the bottom of the porch steps and looked at them for a long time.

“Sit,” he said.

She climbed the steps and sat down in one of the two chairs, on the porch of a house that didn’t have walls yet, and he sat down in the other, and they looked out at Clearwater Lake together while the sky began to change.

The water was very still. October still. Dark and flat and waiting. The mountains on the far shore were black shapes against a sky just starting to go gray, and then blue, and then the faintest edge of rose along the eastern ridge.