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“Pipe chose its moment.”

“It did.” A pause. “You still came.”

He set the plane down. He picked up the sealant.

“Food was good,” he said.

She was quiet. He heard her move, not away, just shifting, the sound of someone turning toward something.

“I’ve been watching you,” she said.

His hands went very still on the sealant tube.

“Not in a strange way,” she added, quickly, and he heard something in her voice that might have been the beginning of a laugh at herself. “I just mean. I’ve been noticing things. The groceries at Vera’s. The playground board. The church steps.” A pause. “You do all of it and you never say anything about it.”

“Things need doing,” he said. His voice came out even, which cost something.

“I know.” Her voice was quiet. “That’s not what I’m saying.” A breath. “I’m saying I see it. I see you. I think maybe not enough people do.”

The sealant tube was in his hands and he was not applying it and the room was very still.

He turned around.

She was at her supply station, a few feet away, closer than he’d registered, and she was looking at him directly in the way she looked at things, not performing the looking, just doing it, her brown eyes steady and warm and seeing him with the quality he’d been trying not to think about since August, the look of someone who looked at a thing and saw what it actually was rather than what it was supposed to be.

She had paint on her left hand already. Cobalt blue, the outside of her palm.

The morning light came through the window behind him, the window he’d fixed, the one that moved freely now, the one he’d come here at seven in the morning on a Thursday to fix and had told himself was only about the window, and it fell across her in a way that made the quality of her completely impossible to look away from.

He looked anyway.

He meant to say something practical. He had a practical thing ready, the library windows, Helen’s scheduling, something with useful information that would move them back onto safe ground.

What he said was:

“Allison.”

Just that.

Her name. Her actual name, not Ms. Hayes, not the professional distance of a title, just the name itself, and it came out before he could stop it and it landed in the quiet classroom like something that had been held back for a long time and had finally gotten out.

She went completely still.

The whole room went still, or seemed to, the stillness of a moment that knows it’s a moment.

He said what he’d meant to say. “The library. South windows. Talk to Helen before Friday. She does the December scheduling then.”

His voice was even.

He turned back to the window.

He applied the sealant with the careful attention of a man who was giving something that required no careful attention his full careful attention, because the alternative was standing in the middle of a classroom in the early December light and examining what had just happened, which he was not going to do.

He heard her breathe.

Just once. Just the smallest sound, the sound of someone who had been holding something and had let it go slightly.

He tested the window frame. Smooth. Done.