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Then she climbed down and turned it over. The pumpkins were mostly fine. One corner had dragged through the mud, and three of the pumpkins along the edge were now a color no kindergartner had ever intended.

She sat down on the bottom step of the ladder with the panel across her knees, and all at once she could feel exactly how tired she was.

“I knew it,” said a voice.

Lauren was standing at the edge of the lamplight with two cups of cider and the expression of a woman who had driven home, eaten dinner, and driven back.

“I’ve got it,” Allison said automatically.

“You’ve got a muddy pumpkin and a sagging wire.” Lauren set the cider on a fence post. “You’ve said I’ve got it to me three times today. To Margaret twice. To that poor kindergarten aide once, and she cried a little.”

“She did not.”

“She did a little.”

Allison opened her mouth to say sorry, and for once she didn’t just say it. She thought about it first.

She thought about the arch and the garlands and the pumpkin table and the signs, and how good it had felt all week to be needed by everyone. And underneath that, in the place she didn’t usually look, she found how scared she’d been. That if she didn’t do all of it, and do it perfectly, the town might notice she was new. Might decide she was the kind of person who passed through.

It wasn’t generosity, exactly. It was the same old thing in a nicer coat. If she was useful enough, nobody could leave.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and this time she meant it. “You offered, and I should have let you. I didn’t want to need anybody.” She took a breath. “Will you hold the other end of the wire?”

Lauren picked up the pliers. “Thought you’d never ask.”

It took the two of them twelve minutes. Lauren held the line taut while Allison set new staples, and then they switched, and the wire went tight and level, and when they hung the pumpkins again the panel didn’t move at all.

“The mud comes off,” Lauren said. “Or you tell them it’s a pumpkin patch. Pumpkin patches have mud.”

Allison laughed, and it came out a little shaky, and Lauren handed her the cider.

“Ten tomorrow,” Lauren said. “We hang the rest together.”

“Ten,” Allison said.

She was back at seven the next morning with a small brush and the right orange, fixing three pumpkins in the cold before anyone could see. She didn’t tell the kindergarten. At ten, Lauren was already waiting at the fence.

Chapter 12

The Festival

The Merrybrook Harvest Festival came alive at noon.

Not gradually, not the slow build of a thing assembling itself, but all at once, the way small towns did things, the whole of it arriving in a moment like a held breath finally released. One minute Founders Square was the square she walked through every morning on her way to The Brook, the maple and the gazebo and the familiar geometry of Main Street. The next minute it was the festival, and the festival was something else.

It smelled like October made intentional, wood smoke from the fire pit at the square’s north end, cider warming in a large pot at the market’s booth, something from Sweetgrass Bakery that managed to reach across the entire square and find her specifically, cinnamon and brown sugar and the sweetness of Joseph’s apple fritters that he apparently only made twice a year and which had caused a genuine small crowd to form outside his booth by twelve fifteen. The Brennan’s market stand had pumpkins stacked in careful pyramids, ornamental gourds in colors she hadn’t known gourds came in, dried corn in husks tied together with twine. Someone (she suspected Rory) had placed historical photos of the festival going back decades along the fence line at the square’s edge, black and white and sepia, the same gazebo, the same maple tree, different people standing in the same place for seventy years.

The same place. The same festival. The same October light coming through the mountains in that way it had, low and gold and specific to this valley, as if the mountains themselves cupped it and concentrated it into something warmer than it would have been anywhere else.

She stood at the entrance arch, the one she’d built yesterday, the orange ribbon catching exactly the light she’d imagined it catching when she’d planned it at her kitchen table two weeks ago, and she looked at the square full of people and she thought:

I helped build this.

Not the festival. The festival had been here seventy years before her. She meant something else. She meant the arch and the gazebo garlands and the panel display along the east fence and the feeling that it looked the way it was supposed to look, that she had somehow understood what Merrybrook needed for this and had given it something it recognized as its own.

She hadn’t expected to feel so much about an entrance arch.

She went to find her panels.