Page 6

She sat there.

Okay, she thought. Okay.

She got out of the car.

The air hit her again the same way it had on the highway, that coolness, that sweetness underneath the pine, and she stood in the gravel drive with her hand on the car door and breathed it in until her shoulders dropped about an inch from where they’d been living for the last four hours. A cat appeared from somewhere and sat down three feet away and regarded her with the composure of an animal that had seen a great many people arrive and found all of them vaguely predictable.

“Hi,” Allison said.

The cat blinked once.

“Fair enough,” she said, and got her bag from the backseat.

* * *

The woman who opened the door before Allison could knock was perhaps forty, with dark hair pulled back loosely and the kind of calm that didn’t come from nothing, the kind that had been built, carefully, over years.

“Ms. Hayes,” she said. Not a question.

“That’s me.” Allison shifted her bag on her shoulder. “Sorry I’m later than I said, the drive took longer than I expected, the GPS kept...”

“It does that,” the woman said, and stepped back to let her in. “I’m Evelyn. I run the inn.” She said it simply, the way people say things that have been true for long enough that they don’t require emphasis.

“Thank you for waiting.”

“The inn doesn’t close.” Evelyn moved through the entryway ahead of her, unhurried. “Leave your shoes if you’d like. The floors are original.”

Allison looked down. The floors were wide planked pine, worn smooth and golden with age, the kind of floors that had absorbed fifty years of footsteps and were better for it. She left her shoes.

She followed Evelyn through the entryway and into a front sitting room that smelled like woodsmoke and something baking, vanilla, maybe, or something warmer than vanilla, something she couldn’t quite name that made her feel, for a disorienting moment, like she was seven years old and it was Christmas morning and her grandmother was in the next room. She blinked.

The sitting room had two armchairs pulled close to a fireplace that wasn’t lit yet but looked like it would be soon, a bookshelf along one wall so full it bowed slightly in the middle, and a low table with a tea service on it that she was fairly certain hadn’t been there for any particular reason except that she was arriving.

She was being ridiculous. It was a tea service. Inns had tea services.

“Your room is at the top of the stairs, second door on the left,” Evelyn said, setting a key on the front desk, actual keys, not card keys, brass and slightly heavy, and opening a ledger. An actual ledger. Allison found this unreasonably charming. “Breakfast is at seven. Earlier if you need it, just knock on the kitchen door. Tea and coffee in the sitting room anytime.” She glanced up. “You’re here through Wednesday?”

“Wednesday, yes. My rental...” She stopped. The cat had reappeared, slipping silently through a doorway she hadn’t noticed, and was now sitting directly at her feet, looking up at her with an expression she could only describe as deliberate. “Is that, is that your cat?”

“That’s Pepper.” Evelyn’s voice carried something that might have been amusement, carefully managed. “She goes where she likes.”

“She was outside when I pulled in.”

“She often is.” Evelyn handed her the key. “Second door on the left. The window seat faces the lake. There are extra quilts in the wardrobe if you get cold, it drops fast here once the sun goes down.” She paused. “You drove from Missoula?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a long day.” She said it without inflection, but it landed with a weight that felt like more than observation. Like acknowledgment. Like someone saying I know what it costs to get here.

“It was,” Allison said.

Evelyn nodded once, and that was that.

* * *

The room was small.

Small in the way that meant everything that was in it was exactly what was needed and nothing else, a bed with a white iron headboard and a quilt in deep blues and greens that looked like it had been made by hand, a wardrobe of dark wood, a small writing desk under the window, and in the corner, a window seat just wide enough to curl up on, cushioned in something soft, facing a window that looked out over the porch roof and the gravel drive and the spruce trees and the lake.