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Shane’s hand lowered. He took a small step back that was also, somehow, the largest distance.
He cleared his throat. The only imperfect thing she’d ever heard him do.
“I’ll be right there,” he said, to Rick, and his voice was even, the way it always was, the careful evenness that was so much a part of him that she’d stopped noticing it until a moment like this when she could hear the effort in it.
He looked at her.
“Excuse me,” he said.
And he went.
* * *
She stood at the edge of Founders Square near the gazebo and listened to the music and felt the cold and watched the bonfire and didn’t move for a long time.
The flowers were still blooming at the base of the gazebo. Purple, impossible, real.
She raised her hand slowly and put her fingers against her own jaw, where his fingers had been.
The cold night air where something warm had been.
Oh no, she thought.
The music played. The fire settled lower. The mountains held the valley the way they always did, the way they had for longer than the town had been there to notice.
Oh no oh no oh no.
She stood there until the cold made standing still impossible, and then she walked home alone through the October dark with her hand still pressed against her jaw, past the spruce trees breathing on Lakeview Lane and the gap where the lake showed through silver in the starlight, and she went inside and sat down at her kitchen table and looked at the carved sparrow she’d taken out of her pocket and set on the table in front of her.
A small carved bird, better than its maker thought it was.
She looked at it for a long time.
She thought about Allison, said like that, said like it was the only word that mattered.
She went to bed without calling Becca.
Some things needed to stay yours for a little while before you gave them to anyone else.
Chapter 13
Halloween
Merrybrook took Halloween seriously.
She hadn’t known this when she arrived. She’d known about the Harvest Festival. That had been in the school materials, in the committee meeting, in every conversation she’d had in September. But Halloween had not been on any official document, which meant it was the kind of thing Merrybrook simply did, the way it did most things, without announcement, without agenda, because it had always done it and saw no reason to stop.
She found out on October twenty eighth when she walked to The Brook in the morning and discovered that Main Street had transformed overnight.
Not decorated, transformed. There was a difference. Decorations were things you put up. What had happened to Main Street was something more like what happened when a place decided to become something and committed fully. Corn stalks tied to every lamppost. Carved pumpkins on every stoop, not the standard triangle eyes kind but proper carved ones, detailed and various, clearly the work of multiple people with multiple opinions about what a pumpkin should look like when it was being its best self. The hardware store had an arrangement of tools and cobwebs in the window that was either a display or a haunted workshop, she genuinely couldn’t tell. Thistle & Ink had something in its window that she slowed down to look at and then felt, obscurely, that she should keep walking.
The decorations at Thistle & Ink looked slightly too real.
She kept walking.
The Brook smelled like cinnamon and something darker underneath, cardamom, maybe, or something she didn’t have a name for, something that made the morning feel like it had more edges than usual. Joseph’s delivery had included something new: small dark pastries in a basket on the counter that Molly was selling with the serene confidence of someone who had been told not to explain them.
“What are those?” Allison asked.
