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By nine o’clock the festival had slowed to its late self, the families with children had gone home, the food booths were closing, the bonfire had settled from its earlier height into something lower and more intimate, the light of it moving across the square in the way firelight moved, everything it touched turned amber and shifting. The temperature had dropped into the kind of cold that felt like something rather than just an absence of warmth. The mountains above the valley were shapes against a sky full of stars, enormous and close in the way they were on clear October nights, the kind of close that made you feel both very small and very held.

The music (someone with a guitar and a fiddle set up near the gazebo) had shifted from its earlier energetic self into something slower, something that floated at the edges of the square and didn’t demand attention, just offered it.

The crowd had thinned to the people who had nowhere they needed to be.

She was one of them.

She was standing at the edge of Founders Square, near the gazebo, with her cider, her third, watching the bonfire and listening to the music and thinking about nothing in particular, which was a thing she’d gotten better at in Merrybrook, the skill of being exactly where you were without editing it.

She was aware, in her peripheral way, that Shane had come to stand beside her.

She didn’t turn. He didn’t speak. They stood in the firelight at the edge of the square and the music moved around them and the mountains stood behind everything and the town went quietly about the end of its evening.

She looked up at the mountains.

She thought about what he’d said earlier, you’re teaching them to see, and about Sophie’s corner with the hardware store in it, and about Marcus’s upside-down lake, and about a school full of kids who had stood in front of blank panels three weeks ago and made something she hadn’t been able to look at without embarrassing herself.

She thought about being exactly where you were supposed to be.

The flowers around the base of the gazebo were blooming.

She noticed this in the vague way she noticed Merrybrook’s particular impossibilities now, not with surprise exactly, more with the quiet acknowledgment that the town did what the town did, and that this moment apparently required flowers.

She turned to say something to him (she wasn’t sure what, something about the mountains or the music or Sophie’s corner or any of the things that were moving through her on this October night at the edge of a festival she’d helped build in a town she hadn’t planned on) and found him closer than she’d expected.

Not close in an alarming way. Close in the way of someone who had been standing exactly where he’d been and hadn’t moved, and she’d turned, and the distance between them was simply less than she’d registered.

The firelight moved across his face.

He was looking at her.

She forgot what she’d been going to say.

He reached out, slowly, with the deliberateness of someone who had thought about this, who had made a decision rather than stumbled into one, and tucked a strand of her hair back from her face. His fingers grazed her jaw. Just barely. Just the edge of a touch, the suggestion of one, the warmth of it against her skin in the cold October air.

She went completely still.

He went completely still.

“Allison.”

Her name in his voice. Just that. Just her name, said the way he said the things that mattered to him, without ornamentation, without anything extra, just the word itself carrying everything it was supposed to carry.

She didn’t breathe.

The music played.

The flowers bloomed at the base of the gazebo, purple and impossible.

He was looking at her like he was deciding something, or had already decided something and was figuring out what came next, and she was looking at him and the firelight was between them and the mountains were behind everything and...

“Shane.” Rick Brennan’s voice, from the direction of the north food booths, carrying the tone of a man who needed something fixed and needed it fixed now. “Shane, the generator’s making that sound again.”

The moment cracked.

Not shattered, cracked, like ice over water, the shape of it still visible but the surface broken.