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She wrapped both hands around her coffee and watched it come.

She was so busy watching the sunrise that it took her a moment to notice he wasn’t watching it at all. He was watching her.

“What,” she said.

He didn’t answer. He set his coffee down on the new boards of the porch. He stood up out of his chair. And then, very deliberately, the way he did everything, Shane Colter got down on one knee on the porch of the house he had been drawing for twenty years.

She stopped breathing.

There was sawdust on his shirt.

She saw it in the first gray light. A long pale streak of it across the chest of his flannel, the good one, the one he’d put on in the dark that morning.

“You have sawdust on your shirt,” she whispered.

“I know,” he said. “I put it there on purpose.”

She put her hand over her mouth.

“Roy asked my grandmother in her father’s kitchen,” he said, “with sawdust on his shirt. He’d spent the whole afternoon fixing her father’s porch railing, because he didn’t know how to say it, and then he figured out a railing was never going to say it for him.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “I don’t have a railing. I’ve got a porch. I built it for you.”

He took out a small box. Dark walnut, rich and warm, the grain running through it like water. The last of Roy’s board. She knew it the moment she saw it.

He opened it.

Inside was a ring. Old gold, worn soft and thin with years, set with a small, clear stone that caught the first light coming over the mountains and threw it back at her.

“It was hers,” he said. “Roy gave it to her in that kitchen. She wore it every day for fifty-one years.” His voice had gone rough. “She’d want it on a hand that has paint on it.”

She looked down. There was paint on her left hand. Cobalt blue, along the outside of her palm, the same place it had been on the morning she turned around at The Brook and walked straight into him. She had been working on the festival mural until ten the night before. Of course there was paint.

She laughed. She was already crying.

“Allie,” he said.

The lake went still. Not calm. Still. The whole wide water went flat as glass all at once, holding the sky and the mountains upside down, not one ripple anywhere, as if the entire valley had stopped to listen.

“I have spent my whole life being careful,” he said. “Being useful. Fixing things so I wouldn’t have to ask for anything.” He took a breath. “I’m asking. Marry me.”

She didn’t make him wait.

She didn’t even let him finish holding out the box. She was out of her chair and down on her knees on the porch in front of him, and her hands were on his face, and she was saying yes against his mouth, yes, yes, of course yes, and the sun came up over the eastern ridge and poured across the lake and the new porch and the two chairs and the two of them, and neither one of them saw it.

When he finally slid the ring onto her finger, it fit.

It fit exactly.

“You measured it,” she said, laughing and crying at once.

“You were in the shower,” he said.

* * *

By eight o’clock the whole town knew.

She did not know how. They had driven straight from the lake to The Brook, because it was the festival and because it was seven forty-five and that was simply what they did now. Molly had taken one look at her left hand on the counter, set down both of their mugs side by side, touching, and walked directly into the kitchen without a word. Thirty seconds later, from the kitchen, there had been a scream.

At eight fifteen, Nora came out front with a piece of chalk, wiped the board clean, and wrote in her careful, steady hand: