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She moved toward aisle two. He moved toward wherever he’d been going. The aisle was narrow, narrower than she’d registered when she’d walked through it earlier, and they were briefly in the same space, both reaching slightly, her for the end of the shelf to steady herself, him for a hook on the wall above the shelving unit.

Their hands didn’t touch.

They came close. Close enough to feel the warmth of him.

She got her hand on the shelf end. He got his hand on the hook. Neither of them said anything for a moment.

“Sorry,” she said, moving.

“No,” he said, which wasn’t quite a sentence but conveyed that she had nothing to apologize for, which was progress from it’s fine.

She went to aisle two.

She found the ribbon. She stood in aisle two for a moment longer than she needed to, looking at ribbon she’d already found, until she heard him move away.

* * *

She brought everything to the counter and Doug rang it up with the efficiency of someone who had been running a register for twenty-five years and found it required very little conscious attention.

“Festival decorations?” he said.

“And a student project. Wood panels.”

“Shane cuts panels,” Doug said, without inflection. “If you need it. Cleaner than doing it yourself.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.

She paid. She collected her bag. She was almost at the door when she became aware that she was being watched, not intrusively, not obviously, but in the way that the back of her neck registered attention the way it sometimes did. She didn’t turn around.

She went out.

The bell rang behind her.

On the windowsill outside, the wide wooden sill under the front window of Colter Hardware, where someone had placed three clay pots of something that had probably finished blooming weeks ago, there was a small cluster of flowers she didn’t recognize. Purple, delicate, impossibly late in the season.

She looked at them.

She looked at the store window.

She couldn’t see much through the glass, the interior was dim against the afternoon brightness outside, but she thought, for a moment, that there was a shape near the back of the store that was standing still in a way that suggested it had been watching something.

She shifted her bag to her other shoulder and walked back toward Main Street.

* * *

Inside, Doug Dawson looked at the windowsill.

Then he looked at Shane.

Shane was reorganizing a shelf that didn’t need reorganizing.

Doug raised an eyebrow.

Shane didn’t look at him.

“Those flowers weren’t blooming this morning,” Doug said.

“Hm,” Shane said.