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The grin widened into something that could only be described as gleeful.

She biked away and nearly clipped a jack-o’-lantern on the Merrybrook Market stoop.

“I like her,” Allison said.

“Everyone likes Charlie,” Shane said. “She knows it and uses it.”

“Is that bad?”

He considered. “No. Roy used to say the people who know their own worth are easier to be around than the ones who don’t.”

She looked at him. He’d said Roy’s name easily, not with weight, just naturally, the way you said the name of someone you thought about often. She noticed this and filed it somewhere.

* * *

The parade finished and became the general Halloween evening, and they moved through it together the same way they’d walked the festival, not by decision, just by the absence of deciding otherwise. Main Street had gone from afternoon chaos to early evening warmth, the carved pumpkins lighting the storefronts in shifting orange, the smell of woodsmoke and cold air and something sweet from Joseph’s still open booth. Above the buildings the sky had gone deep blue at the edges and deeper at the center, the first stars finding their way through, the mountains enormous and close the way they were on clear October nights.

Their arms touched occasionally as they walked.

Neither moved away.

They didn’t talk much. She’d learned his quiet by now, it didn’t require filling, it didn’t mean anything was wrong, it was simply what two people did when they were in the same place and that was enough. She’d spent years filling silences because they’d made her anxious. This one settled around her like the cold air and the woodsmoke and she let it.

* * *

Vera Hutchins ran the Halloween soup operation from a folding table on her front porch on Birch Street, the way she had for twenty years, with the authority of someone who had strong opinions about how it should go and no patience for deviation. The porch was lit with more jack-o’-lanterns than strictly necessary and smelled like whatever was in the pot, root vegetables and something smoky that she wasn’t sharing the recipe for and nobody was asking about because the asking would slow down the getting.

The porch was small. Birch Street was busy with Halloween traffic. The crowd around Vera’s table was three deep in places, shifting and rearranging itself in the way of small crowds in small spaces, and somewhere in the middle of getting her soup Allison got moved by the crowd’s movement, a family coming up the porch steps behind her, a group leaving to her left, and found herself standing closer to Shane than she’d been all evening.

Close enough that she could feel the warmth of him in the cold air.

She looked up.

He was already looking at her.

She didn’t move.

He didn’t move.

The crowd shifted around them, completely indifferent, and the jack-o’-lanterns threw their orange light across his face and across the flower crown she’d made herself from Taylor’s dried flowers, and neither of them said anything, and the moment stretched like taffy, like it had more time inside it than moments usually did.

She became aware of her own breathing.

She became aware that he was aware of her breathing.

Vera Hutchins pushed a cup of soup into Allison’s hands.

“Root vegetable,” Vera said, with the energy of someone who had been watching two people stand too close together and had decided soup was the appropriate intervention. “Eat it while it’s hot.”

Allison looked at her soup.

Shane looked at his soup.

Vera looked at both of them with the expression of a woman who had seen eighty-one years of people being foolish about each other and found it more endearing than not.

“First Halloween,” she said to Allison.

“First one,” Allison confirmed, slightly breathlessly.