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“You’ll stay,” Vera said, not unkindly, just as a statement of fact.

Allison looked at the street, at the glowing pumpkins, the woodsmoke, the mountains above the rooflines, Shane standing a half step away looking at his soup with great focus...

“I think I might,” she said.

Vera handed her bread. “Good. We were getting low on teachers.”

She moved to the next person in line and left Allison standing in the orange light with her soup and her heartbeat and the awareness of someone beside her that she had stopped being able to pretend was ordinary.

* * *

Charlie Keller reappeared at some point in the evening, bicycle free now, witch hat still precarious, materializing at Allison’s elbow with the energy of someone who had been waiting for exactly this opportunity.

“Ms. Hayes,” she said, with elaborate casualness. “You look really nice.”

“Thank you, Charlie.”

“Really, really nice.” She glanced at Shane, who was three feet away talking to Rick Brennan. “Like. Really.”

“Thank you, Charlie.”

“I’m just saying.”

“I know what you’re saying.”

Charlie’s expression was the picture of innocence. “I’m not saying anything.”

“Charlie.”

“Enjoy your soup, Ms. Hayes.” She drifted away with the serene confidence of someone who had accomplished exactly what she’d set out to accomplish.

Allison looked at her soup.

She did not look at Shane.

She thought about the look on his face in the orange light of Vera’s porch, and the warmth of him in the cold air, and her own breathing, and decided that soup was very interesting and she was going to think about soup.

She thought about soup for approximately four seconds.

* * *

They ended up at the edge of Founders Square as the evening wound down, the carved pumpkins burning lower, the crowd thinning to the people with nowhere they needed to be, the cold settling properly now, the kind that went through a coat rather than around it.

“Shane,” she said.

“Mm.”

She’d been going to say something. Something about the festival, maybe, or about Vera’s porch, or about the six days she’d been walking past the hardware store instead of into it. The words arranged and rearranged themselves and what came out instead was:

“Earl’s bird. The sparrow. I put it on my kitchen table.”

He looked at her. The jack-o’-lanterns threw their last light across his face.

“It’s good to have something on a table,” he said, after a moment. “Makes a place feel lived in.”

She thought about the cottage on Lakeview Lane and the kitchen table and the carved sparrow and the flower crown she was going to put next to it when she got home, and about how three months ago she’d had an apartment she’d spent three years in that had never felt like hers and now she had a table that felt like everything.

“Yes,” she said. “It does.”