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He heard Allison go very still behind him, not a sound exactly, more the absence of one, the look of someone who had turned around and understood what they were looking at.

He held the frame until he was sure of it.

Then he set the support bracket, carefully, at the base of the south corner post, and straightened up, and turned around.

She was standing exactly where she’d been, the ribbon still in her hands, her face doing something he didn’t have language for... something between relief and the expression of someone who had just registered how close a thing had come.

“You okay?” he said.

She looked at him.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

He nodded. He turned back to the booth frame and checked the bracket, solid, correctly positioned, and then checked the rest of the frame, systematically, the way he checked everything, because thoroughness was the difference between fixing a thing and thinking you’d fixed a thing.

He was aware of her still standing there while he did this. He was aware of the quality of her stillness, which was different from her usual quality of motion. He checked the third connection point and the fourth and didn’t look back.

When he’d finished he gathered his tools and moved to the next thing on the list.

* * *

He was on the west side of the square, running the last of the generator check, when he became aware that the afternoon had gone quiet in the way of late October afternoons, the light going gold and low, the air carrying the clarity that came when the temperature dropped and the humidity went with it. The square had taken its shape now, booths in their positions, decorations up, the entrance arch catching the afternoon light in the orange and gold that Allison had planned with more precision than an entrance arch strictly required.

It looked, he thought, and then stopped thinking it, and then thought it anyway...

It looked exactly right. Like Merrybrook in October, which was its own thing, a thing he’d been looking at his whole life, and which she had somehow understood from the outside, from six weeks of being here, from paying the kind of attention to a place that most people never managed.

He put the generator check on the list as done.

He looked at the square, at the booths and the garlands and the maple tree in full color and the gazebo with its properly placed garlands and the entrance arch, and then he looked at Allison, who was at the other end of the square talking to Lauren and didn’t know he was looking, and he thought, with the honesty of a late afternoon when the work was mostly done and he had less to occupy his mind than was safe:

She’d built something here. In six weeks. Not the decorations, those were just ribbon and wire and an eye for color that he’d been watching all day with the attention you paid to things you couldn’t stop paying attention to. He meant the other thing. The thing that made Paulette Marsh feel essential and made the whole committee work better than it usually did and made twenty-two kids paint panels for a festival because they wanted to, not because they’d been assigned to.

She’d built something and she didn’t know she’d done it and that was, he thought, exactly the kind of person she was.

He picked up his toolbox.

He went to find the next thing on the list.

There was always another thing on the list.

That had always been enough.

He thought about whether it still was for approximately three seconds, and then put it away, and went to find what needed fixing.

* * *

By six the square was empty except for her.

She had said yes to everything. That was the problem, and she had known it was the problem since about Tuesday, and she had kept saying yes anyway. Yes to the entrance arch. Yes to Margaret about the garlands, and to Rick about the table signs, and to the kindergarten about a pumpkin table nobody had planned for. Yes to stringing the wire for the student panels herself, tonight, alone, because they were the kids’ work and she wanted every one of them perfect and nobody else knew exactly where each panel went. Lauren had offered to stay three times. Allison had said I’ve got it three times, cheerfully, the way she had been saying it her whole life.

Now it was dark and cold, and she was on a borrowed stepladder at the east fence with a spool of wire and a pair of pliers, working by the light of the one lamppost that reached this far.

She tested the line with the kindergarten’s panel, a field of lopsided orange pumpkins.

The wire held for about ten seconds. Then a staple let go of the second fence post with a sound like a cap gun, the line sagged, and the panel slid down the wire and dropped face first into the wet grass.

She stood on the ladder and looked at it.