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He set his travel mug on the counter (she hadn’t noticed him do it, it was just suddenly there, a battered steel thing that had been used long enough to have earned its dents) and looked at his shirt with the expression of a man taking inventory of a situation and deciding how to proceed.

He didn’t proceed.

He just stood there, looking at his shirt, and then he looked at her, and there was something in that look, brief, contained, quickly gone, that she couldn’t identify before he’d already moved on from it.

It’s fine, he’d said. Twice.

She was going to think about the way he’d said that for longer than was reasonable, she could already tell.

“I’ll get you napkins,” she said. “Or... I can...”

“It’s all right,” he said. Slightly different from it’s fine. Marginally more convincing.

He looked at her for one more moment (she still couldn’t read it, whatever it was) and then he walked to the door. One hand in his jacket pocket. The other empty, his travel mug still sitting forgotten on the counter.

The bell rang.

He was gone.

Allison stood holding her empty mug.

She looked at the door. She looked at the counter where his travel mug sat, abandoned, slightly dented, waiting patiently for a man who had walked out without it.

“That,” said Molly from behind the counter, in the tone of someone who had been waiting patiently to deliver a single line and was very pleased with the moment, “was Shane Colter.”

Allison looked at the travel mug.

“Of course it was,” she said.

* * *

She stood there for a moment after Molly moved on to other customers, and the embarrassment did what embarrassment did, moved through her in waves, her face warm, her brain replaying the arc of the coffee with unhelpful precision. She thought about his expression. The careful neutrality of it. It’s fine. The way he’d said it, like a door closing politely but firmly.

She thought about what Rory had said yesterday. The kind of person a town relies on without realizing it’s relying on him. She looked out the window at the hardware store sign across the square, Est. 1958, and then back at the travel mug sitting on the counter, slightly dented, handle worn smooth with use.

She went back to the counter.

“He forgot his mug,” she said.

“He did,” Molly agreed, with the serenity of someone who had already noted this and was waiting for the story to develop.

Allison looked at the case beside the register, the cinnamon rolls Joseph had dropped off that morning, enormous and golden and smelling like the best version of themselves. She’d had one on her second morning and thought about it every morning since.

“Can I get one of those?” she said. “And... could you leave it with his mug? For when he comes back.” She paused. “Don’t tell him who it’s from.”

Molly looked at her for a moment with an expression that Allison couldn’t quite read, warm and knowing and something else underneath that she didn’t have the context yet to identify.

“Sure,” Molly said simply, and that was that.

Allison finished her coffee standing at the counter, thinking about nothing in particular, and left.

* * *

Shane

He was halfway down Main Street before he realized he’d left his mug.

He stopped walking.