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“No,” she said. “I don’t think any of it was.”

Becca was quiet, looking at the fire.

“Can I say something?” she said.

“You’re going to whether I say yes or not.”

“True.” Becca turned to look at her, the honest face that had been reading her since they were children. “You have spent a very long time being everyone’s person. Ryan’s person. Your friends’ person. Everyone’s emergency contact and support system and the one who remembers birthdays.” She paused. “And I think somewhere along the way you started to believe that was all you were going to get. Being someone’s person without having a person.”

Allison didn’t say anything.

“I think this man,” Becca said carefully, “looks at you like you are the entire room. And I think that terrifies you because you don’t know what to do when someone sees you first.”

The fire had gone to low embers, orange and quiet.

“He hasn’t done anything,” Allison said. “Not really. Not...”

“He walked through a crowd,” Becca said. “For you. On purpose.”

Allison looked at her wine glass.

“Yeah,” she said quietly.

“That’s something.”

“Yeah.”

Becca reached over and refilled her glass.

“I like Merrybrook,” she said, in the tone of a subject change that wasn’t entirely a subject change. “I like what it’s done with you.”

“It hasn’t done anything.”

“It found you,” Becca said simply. “Same thing.”

They sat by the fire until it went to ash, and the lake was dark outside, and the mountains held the valley, and Allison sat in the cottage that had become hers and felt, quietly and without question, like someone who was exactly where she was supposed to be.

* * *

Becca left Sunday morning.

She hugged Allison on the porch in the cold, the spruce trees doing their breathing thing above them, and held on for a moment longer than a regular hug.

“Call me,” she said. “Regularly. Not just goodnight emojis.”

“I will.”

“And Allison...” She pulled back and looked at her. “You’re allowed to want things. You know that, right?”

Allison thought about a man who had been learning the same lesson from the other side.

“I’m starting to,” she said.

Becca got in the rental car.

She looked at the mountains one more time before she drove away.

Allison stood on the porch until the car disappeared down Lakeview Lane, and then she went inside and stood at the kitchen window with her coffee and watched the mist on Clearwater Lake and thought about being allowed to want things, and about what it might mean to finally believe it.