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He got up.

He made coffee.

He stood at the kitchen window and looked at the mountains going pale gold at the peaks in the early light and thought about the Thursday order and the Pattersons’ pipe and the weather coming next week.

He thought about them with the focused deliberateness of a man who knew exactly what he was not thinking about and had decided, for the length of at least one cup of coffee, not to think about it.

The coffee finished.

He poured a cup.

He thought about it anyway.

Chapter 16

Becca Visits

Becca arrived the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

This had been Allison’s idea, or rather, it had been the natural conclusion of a conversation in early November that had gone: where are you going for Thanksgiving and I don’t know, here I guess and then I’m coming there with the finality of a younger sister who had made a decision and was not accepting alternatives.

Allison had not argued.

She’d given Becca the address of the cottage and the name of the rental car company in Kalispell and a series of increasingly specific warnings about the GPS, which Becca had read and not fully believed until she called from somewhere north of Ronan saying “your GPS just told me I’ve reached a road not supported by this application” and Allison had said “keep going” and Becca had said “ALLISON” and Allison had said “I know, just keep going, I promise.”

Becca kept going.

Becca pulled into the cottage drive forty minutes later and got out of the rental car and looked at the mountains.

They were doing what they did in late November, white at the peaks, the lower slopes gone dark with the stripped treeline, enormous against the pale gray sky in a way that stopped people who weren’t used to them.

Allison was already on the porch.

Becca looked at the mountains.

Then she looked at Allison.

“You’ve been living with that,” she said.

“Every day.”

Her sister was quiet with the mountains for another moment. Then: “Okay. I understand some things better now.”

She got her bag from the back seat and came up the porch steps and hugged Allison properly, the kind of hug that said I’ve been waiting three months to do this, and Allison hugged her back and felt something in her chest unknot that she hadn’t fully noticed was knotted.

* * *

She gave Becca the tour when they got to the cottage, which took eleven minutes because the cottage was not large, and Becca made the appropriate noises about the kitchen and the fireplace and then stood in the bedroom doorway looking at the lake through the east window without saying anything, which was more eloquent than anything she might have said.

“Allison,” she said finally.

“I know,” Allison said.

“This is...”

“I know.”

Becca turned around. She looked at the kitchen table, at the carved sparrow and the dried flower crown sitting side by side, where they’d been since Halloween, and then she looked at Allison with the expression she had when she was deciding whether to ask about something.