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He thought about paint on a left hand. Cobalt blue, faint, worked into the skin.

He thought, and then made himself stop thinking, and then thought anyway, about the rest of her. He was a practical man, and in the half second before the coffee hit he had noticed the practical facts. That she was soft. That she was curved the way women in old paintings were curved, full at the hip and the breast, generous everywhere, nothing sharp about her anywhere. That she had stood there with her dark hair coming loose from whatever she had pinned it up with and her cheeks going pink, apologizing to him nine times, and that from any direction he looked at it she had been the most beautiful thing to walk into The Brook in fifteen years.

He had not meant to notice any of that.

He had noticed all of it.

He thought about the cinnamon roll, which he was still carrying on its plate, which he hadn’t eaten yet, which smelled extraordinary.

He stopped in front of the hardware store and looked up at the sign. Colter Hardware. Est. 1958. Roy’s sign, slightly sun-faded at the top right corner where the afternoon light hit it. He’d been meaning to repaint it for three years.

He went inside.

* * *

Doug was at the counter, annotating the inventory sheet in his handwriting, meticulous and illegible simultaneously, a combination Shane had never understood but had stopped questioning, and looked up when Shane came through the front door and registered, in sequence: the travel mug, the plate, the cinnamon roll, Shane’s expression. He said nothing.

This lasted twenty-five seconds.

“Morning,” Doug said.

“Morning.”

“Good walk?”

Shane set the mug and the cinnamon roll on the counter. He unwrapped the parchment and ate half of it in one go because it was there and he hadn’t eaten breakfast and it was, as it always was, extraordinary, warm and soft with that sweetness of the cream cheese frosting, something underneath it he couldn’t quite locate but that made the morning feel more manageable than it had twenty minutes ago.

He set the other half down on the parchment.

“Coffee situation?” Doug said, nodding at Shane’s shirt.

“I walked into someone.”

“Hm.” Doug turned back to the inventory sheet. “Anyone I know?”

“New teacher.”

“Ah.” A pause that contained a great deal. The pen moved. “Heard she was nice.”

“She apologized nine times.”

Doug set the pen down.

He looked at Shane with the expression, the one that had been showing up for twenty-five years, the one that meant Doug had decided to say the thing Shane wasn’t going to want to hear and had made his peace with the consequences. Shane had never once successfully gotten out ahead of it.

“You counted,” Doug said.

“I was standing there,” Shane said. “There wasn’t much else to do.”

“Right.” Doug picked the pen back up. “Shirt okay?”

“I have spares.”

“Right.” The pen moved. A pause. “She settle in all right? The teacher?”

“I spoke to her for thirty seconds.”

“What’s she like?”