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yeah she typed. I think so. the pie was really good

it always is Lauren said. it always is exactly what you need it to be

Allison stood at the end of her street for a moment.

She looked at the lake.

She thought about someone sitting in a corner booth looking at something that wasn’t there, with his hands around the mug his grandfather had given him, on a Tuesday night in October when the pie was apple.

goodnight she sent.

night Lauren said. get some sleep

She went inside. She made tea. She sat at the kitchen table and looked at the lake through the window, the stars on it, the stillness of it, the mountains dark against the sky beyond.

She didn’t think about anything in particular.

She went to bed.

She slept well, which surprised her, and woke before her alarm, which didn’t.

Chapter 11

Festival Setup

The Merrybrook Harvest Festival setup happened on the Friday before the festival Saturday, and it happened the way it always happened, which was to say, it happened all at once, everywhere, with the organized chaos of a town that had been doing this for long enough to have strong opinions about every detail and no consensus on any of them.

Shane arrived at Founders Square at seven in the morning with his truck bed loaded and his thermos full and a list that Nora had given him two weeks ago that he’d been working through in the margins of his mornings. Booth frames. Electrical for the lighting. The gazebo decorations that someone had to get up high enough to hang, which was going to be him because it was always him, and which required the extension ladder he’d brought from the store. The east side generator, which had been making a sound last year that he’d been meaning to look at since approximately last October.

He looked at the square in the early-morning quiet, the maple in full color now, deep red and gold, the gazebo standing in its center with its peeling paint that he’d also been meaning to get to, and felt the familiar thing that setup day produced in him every year: a kind of purposefulness, the satisfaction of a list that was about to get shorter.

He got to work.

* * *

By nine o’clock, Founders Square had transformed from a quiet park into something that looked like a small town had decided to happen all at once and had not entirely coordinated the timing.

Rick Brennan was directing the placement of the vendor tables with the authority of a man who had strong opinions about spatial relationships and wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. Margaret Finley was supervising the gazebo garlands with an expression that suggested the garlands were not yet meeting her standards. Rory Pike was explaining the historical significance of the festival’s original location to two people who had not asked but were too polite to leave. Jake Morrison was helping with approximately everything, moving between tasks with the boundless useful energy of a golden retriever at a park, equally pleased about all of it.

And Allison Hayes was...

He noticed where she was without meaning to, the way he’d been noticing where she was for six weeks. She was at the far end of the square with a roll of deep orange ribbon and what looked like an organizational system that only she fully understood, working with the deliberate attention she brought to everything. She’d recruited two of the other teachers to help, Lauren Davis and someone from the kindergarten, and the three of them were assembling the entrance arch with a competence that suggested Allison had planned this in more detail than she’d let on at the committee meeting.

He carried a booth frame to its marked position.

He came back for another one.

He noticed, on his third trip, that she’d finished the entrance arch and moved on to the gazebo, where she and Margaret were apparently in complete agreement about the garland placement, which was notable because Margaret was not usually in complete agreement with anyone about garland placement.

He carried the fourth booth frame.

* * *

Jake Morrison found him at ten fifteen, while he was running the electrical for the lighting on the north row of booths.

“Hey,” Jake said, crouching down beside him with the easy openness he brought to every interaction. “Need a hand?”

“I’m fine.”