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“Which has been the same since October.”

Shane moved a box of weatherstripping three inches to the left. “I’m updating it for the season.”

“Hm.” A pause. The pen moved across the inventory sheet with its usual scratching precision. “She came in this morning.”

Shane went still.

“Who,” he said.

“Allison,” Doug said, in the tone of someone who had made a decision to use the name and wasn’t going to hedge it. “While you were at the Hendersons’. Bought some paintbrushes. Asked about panel sealant.” Another pause. “Asked if you’d be in later.”

Shane looked at the weatherstripping display.

“What did you tell her?”

“That you usually were.” Doug turned a page of the inventory sheet. “She said she’d come back.”

Shane picked up a box of weatherstripping and put it back where it had been.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” Doug said, and went back to his inventory with the serenity of a man who had said exactly what he intended to say and was satisfied with the result.

She did not come back that afternoon.

He was aware of this in a way that was information rather than disappointment, which was a distinction he made carefully and believed partially.

* * *

The outsiders always left.

He knew this the way he knew the things that had been true his whole life, facts of nature more than observations. People came to Merrybrook, tourists in summer, the occasional person passing through, the rarer person who came and stayed for a season or two and then remembered they had a life somewhere with better cell service and a larger grocery store.

He’d seen it enough times to have stopped expecting otherwise.

There had been a woman, three years ago, maybe four, who’d come to Merrybrook for the same reason people always came to Merrybrook, which was that something in their regular life had stopped working and they needed somewhere that didn’t know about it. She’d been warm and funny and the town had liked her immediately, which was the town’s way, and she’d been there for seven months and then she’d taken a job in Billings and she’d gone.

He hadn’t been particularly close to her. But he’d watched the town reset around her absence and he’d thought, not for the first time: this is why you don’t. This is why you keep a certain distance from the warm and temporary things. The town absorbed the absence and kept going, the way it always did, but there was a week or two of adjustment, a slight recalibration, and he had watched it from the outside and thought: not again.

He’d been thinking not again for three months now, in varying levels of conviction.

The conviction had been declining.

* * *

The honest thing (and he owed himself the honest thing, sitting alone in the hardware store after closing with the inventory done and the lights down to the single lamp over the counter and the November dark pressing at the windows) the honest thing was that he’d been watching for her.

Not watching watching. Not standing at the window specifically to see if she walked past. Just... knowing, in the peripheral way, where she was in his general vicinity at any given point in the day. Whether she’d been to The Brook yet. Whether her classroom light was on when he walked past the school. Whether the cottage porch light was on at Lakeview Lane when he drove home, which he drove past on the way home even though it added four minutes and there was no practical reason for it.

It wasn’t something he’d decided. It had just... accreted. The way habits did, the way things became true without you signing off on them.

He’d been doing it for weeks.

He sat with this in the lamplight and looked at it directly, the way he looked at things that needed addressing: squarely, without flinching, assessing the actual situation rather than the version of it that was easier to manage.

The actual situation was this: he thought about her with a frequency that was no longer incidental. He noticed things about her that had no practical application, the way she laughed when something caught her off guard, the fact that she talked to every person she met like they were someone worth talking to, the paint that appeared on her hands after she’d been in the classroom and didn’t fully wash off, the way she’d said Roy used to say Merrybrook was the kind of place the world forgot to ruin like the words mattered to her because they mattered to him.

Then he made himself look at the thing underneath it, the thing that had been making absolutely not feel less and less convincing: