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He ran another cut before he answered. Set the board aside.

“Mostly,” he said.

“Mostly?”

“Almost went to Bozeman when I was nineteen. Didn’t go.”

She wondered what had kept him. She didn’t ask. It wasn’t hers to know yet. “Do you wish you had? Gone?”

He picked up the tape measure. He measured the next board with the same economy he measured everything, no wasted motion, no second guessing.

“I used to ask myself that,” he said.

She waited.

“Stopped being a useful question,” he said. “After a while.”

She thought about questions that stopped being useful. About the year she’d spent asking herself why Ryan couldn’t love her the way she needed, which had been a question with no good answer and a lot of wasted time.

“What do you like about it?” she asked. “Merrybrook specifically.”

He paused, just briefly, in a way that suggested the question was unexpected, not unwelcome, just unexpected. Like a door he hadn’t anticipated being asked to open.

“The lake in the morning,” he said, after a moment. “Before it gets loud.”

“Does it get loud?”

“In August. Summer people.” He moved the board to the saw. “Quiet again now.”

“What else?”

He ran the cut. Set the piece aside. Looked at the boards he had left and calculated something she couldn’t follow.

“The way the mountains sit,” he said. “The valley.” A pause. “Roy used to say Merrybrook was the kind of place the world forgot to ruin.”

She was quiet.

“Your grandfather,” she said. Not a question. She knew, from Rory and from Nora and from the sign above the door, that it was Roy’s store, Roy’s town, Roy’s legacy. But she said his name to acknowledge it, because it deserved acknowledging.

“Yes.”

“He sounds like someone worth missing.”

Shane was quiet for long enough that she thought she’d overstepped. She was aware that she did this sometimes, went one question too far, and she was about to say something to smooth it over when he said, simply:

“He was.”

Just that. Two words, and the weight of them sat in the workshop alongside the smell of sawdust and pine, and she understood that she had been given something that wasn’t casually given, and she didn’t say anything else for a while.

* * *

She was stacking the last two panels when she heard the bell over the front door, and then footsteps, and then Jake Morrison appeared in the workshop doorway looking slightly out of breath and holding a bolt he’d brought from somewhere else.

“Hey,” he said to the room, which in his golden retriever way included both of them equally and without calculation. “Sorry to interrupt. Doug said you were back here and I just needed to check the size on this, I’ve got a bracket situation at the school that’s...” He looked at the bolt, looked at Shane. “Actually do you have a minute? I can’t figure out if I need a half inch or five-eighths.”

“Five-eighths,” Shane said, without looking at the bolt.

Jake blinked. “You didn’t even...”