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“Through the weekend. I came for Thanksgiving.”

Something shifted in Nora’s expression, approving, the way she approved of things without making a production of it. “Good.” She looked at Allison. “You’re coming Thursday? To the gym?”

“I didn’t know there was a Thursday.”

“There’s always a Thursday,” Nora said. “Community dinner. School gym. Noon. Bring something you can actually make.”

She went back to the counter.

Becca watched her go. “She knew my name,” she said.

“She knows everything. I stopped questioning it around week three.”

“And the coffee...”

“Week two.”

Becca turned back to her cardamom honey drink. She took a sip. She set it down.

“Allison,” she said. “This town.”

“I know.”

“No. I mean...” She looked around The Brook, at the familiar faces, the candles and the fogged windows and the quality of a place that knew itself. “I’ve been worried about you. Since you left. Not worried worried, just... the way you worry when someone you love does something brave and you don’t know if it’s going to work out.”

“Becca...”

“And this is working out.” She looked at the square. At the maple and the gazebo and the sign. “You walk differently here. You breathe differently.” She picked up her cup. “You look like someone who’s been found.”

Allison sat with that.

She thought about the afternoon she had come around the last curve and seen the lake for the first time.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “I think maybe I have been.”

* * *

She introduced Becca to Lauren at the school (Lauren was staying late, which was very Lauren) and they took to each other with the efficiency of people who recognized something familiar immediately.

“I like her,” Becca said, when they left.

“She texted me the same thing while we were still in the building.”

They walked Main Street in the November cold, Allison narrating, Thistle & Ink, Claire and Henry, the Sweetgrass cinnamon rolls she was going to get Becca in the morning, Wild Rose and Taylor’s winter arrangements. They stopped outside Colter Hardware.

Becca looked at the sign.

“Is he in there?”

“I don’t know,” Allison said, which was not entirely true because she could see Doug at the counter and the workshop light was on, but she wasn’t going to say that.

“Let’s go in,” Becca said.

“We don’t need anything.”

“I want to see where you get your supplies.”

“Becca.”