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* * *

The student panel display was along the east fence, eight panels hung at eye level on the wire she and Lauren had strung between the fence posts, one for each of the school’s eight homerooms, the panels she’d watched the kids paint over the past three weeks in every spare period and twice after school. She’d kept them covered until this morning. She and Lauren had hung them together at ten o’clock, before the crowds arrived, and then she had walked away because she couldn’t look at them and also look at anything else and there had been too much else to look at.

She looked at them now.

Marcus’s class had the panel second from the left. They’d painted the lake, which was not a surprise, except that it had been Marcus’s idea to paint it the way she’d asked them all to paint it, from where they stood, and he had talked the rest of his class into seeing it from where he saw it, which meant they’d painted it from approximately six inches above the ground, from the angle of a child lying on the dock, the lake filling the entire panel and the mountains reflected in it upside down and enormous, the sky a thin strip at the bottom. Marcus had painted the upside-down mountains himself. It was extraordinary. He was nine years old.

Sophie’s class had the panel in the center. They’d painted Main Street, and most of it was what she would have expected, the storefronts in a bright crowded row, the gazebo at the end, a dog somebody had insisted on. But in the upper left corner, in a square no bigger than a sheet of notebook paper, Sophie had painted her own piece of it. Not the whole street. Just the angle between the hardware store and the bookshop, the slice of sky above them, the way the light came down between the buildings in the late afternoon. Shane’s sign was in it, Colter Hardware in small letters, barely readable, just there. She’d painted it without knowing what it meant to paint it. She’d just painted what she saw from where she stood.

Allison stood in front of Sophie’s corner for a long time.

She didn’t hear the crowd building around her. She heard it eventually, the voices, the note of response that moved through people when they looked at something they hadn’t expected, that small intake of approval, and she looked up and there were people around her, strangers and familiar faces, looking at the panels with the expression she recognized from her best teaching days: the expression of people who were seeing children clearly for the first time.

She pressed her cider cup to her face.

She was not crying.

She was using the cider to warm her cheeks, which had gotten cold.

She turned away and walked very quickly to the other side of the booth row.

* * *

The festival had a rhythm to it that she was learning as she moved through it, the food vendors at the north end where the smell was most concentrated, the craft booths along the west side, the community organization tables at the south where the school had a table and the library had a table and Rory’s Historical Society had a table with Rory behind it, deep in conversation with a man who had made the mistake of asking one question. The bonfire was at the square’s center, a controlled structure of logs that had been burning since eleven and would burn until the last person left, the smoke going up straight in the windless October air, the heat of it reaching her even from thirty feet away.

She moved through all of it.

She talked to everyone.

This was not a plan. It was simply what happened when she moved through a place she’d been for two months now and had been paying attention to for all of it. She knew Karen and David’s last name now, Kowalski, and she knew that David grew the pumpkins in the market booth’s pyramid and was proud of the one in the center that was forty-two pounds because she’d been told about it in September. She knew that the woman at the far end of the library table was named Patricia and had been running the Merrybrook library for twenty-three years and had ordered every book Rory had ever recommended without complaint. She knew that the man in the flannel vest behind the crafts booth on the west side was named Earl and carved wooden birds in his garage on winter evenings, and that the birds in his booth were better than he thought they were, and that she told him so and he’d gone slightly pink around the ears and said ah, well.

She was talking to Earl about the birds when she became aware, in the peripheral attention way she’d become accustomed to, that Shane Colter was standing in front of the student panel display.

She didn’t turn around. She knew it was him the way she’d started to know where he was in spaces they shared, some combination of the quality of stillness he brought wherever he went and the way the air around him seemed to acknowledge his presence. She was fairly certain this was not a normal thing to notice about a person. She noticed it anyway.

She finished talking to Earl. She thanked him for his time. She bought a small carved sparrow because it was perfect and because Earl’s ears had gone pink when she’d complimented him and she wanted him to know she meant it.

She turned around.

Shane was still in front of the panels. He’d been there for a while, longer than most people stood in front of anything at a festival, longer than casual looking. He was standing in front of the center panel, close enough to see Sophie’s corner of it, and she watched him for a moment before he moved, watched the set of his shoulders and the quality of his attention, which was the same quality he brought to everything, thorough, unrushed, seeing the whole of what he was looking at before he decided what he thought about it.

He looked at the panels for another moment.

Then he turned, and his eyes found her across the square with a directness that suggested he’d known where she was before he looked, which she declined to examine.

He came toward her.

* * *

She had a second to compose herself, which was not quite enough.

“Your kids did good work,” he said.

That was all. Four words, said in his even unhurried voice, and she felt them land somewhere in the center of her chest with a warmth that was disproportionate to four words and she didn’t care.

She beamed at him.

She couldn’t help it (she’d stopped being able to help it around him, she was discovering) and his expression shifted slightly in the way she’d learned to watch for, the slight recalibration of a man who had not been prepared for the full beam of her attention directed at him and was managing the impact.