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They stood there a while longer.

The pumpkins burned in the October dark.

The mountains held the valley the way they always did.

And Shane Colter stood beside her in the cold and didn’t move to leave and she didn’t move to leave and the town went quietly about its business and the evening was cold and woodsmoke scented and charged in a way that easy didn’t quite cover anymore, in a way that was something more than easy, something that had no name yet but was definitely something, and she stood in the middle of it and let herself feel it without trying to decide what it was.

* * *

She walked home alone at nine, past the glowing storefronts and the breathing spruce trees on Lakeview Lane.

She texted Becca: merrybrook does halloween

Three minutes.

how was it

She looked at the gap in the trees where the lake showed through, dark and still, the stars on it, the mountains enormous behind everything.

really good she typed. like, really really good

and? Becca sent back immediately.

Allison smiled at her phone in the dark on Lakeview Lane.

goodnight becca

ALLISON

goodnight 😊

She went inside.

She took the flower crown off carefully and set it on the kitchen table next to the carved sparrow. She looked at the two of them together, the small wooden bird and the circle of dried flowers, and thought they looked right there, like the table had been waiting for exactly those two things.

She made tea. She sat down. She thought about nothing in particular.

She thought, without meaning to, about the look of someone’s attention in jack-o’-lantern light.

She went to bed.

She dreamed about something warm she couldn’t hold onto when she woke, woodsmoke and cold air and the low register of a voice saying something she almost heard.

She woke up smiling.

She got up and made coffee and stood at the kitchen window and watched the mist on Clearwater Lake and thought about the day ahead, which was a Tuesday in November, which was just a day, which was also, in Merrybrook, never just anything.

Chapter 14

What He Does

She noticed the groceries first.

It was a Thursday morning in early November, cold enough now that her breath showed on the walk to school, the mountains dusted white at the peaks for the first time since she’d arrived. The valley was doing something different with the light these days, the harvest gold was gone, the maples stripped, and what was left had a quieter quality, a grayish silver that turned everything slightly contemplative. She’d been finding herself stopping more, noticing more, now that the world had slowed down and stopped performing at her.

She was coming down Birch Street (she’d started taking different routes to school since she’d started taking routes that weren’t past the hardware store, which was a thing she was doing and not examining) when she saw Vera’s porch.

There was a bag on it. Paper grocery bag, the good heavy kind, sitting beside the front door with the settled quality of something placed with care rather than left in a hurry. Vera’s car was in the drive. The lights in the house were still off. It was early, not quite seven, Vera wouldn’t be up for another hour at least.