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She looked at it now.

Sitting in the planning meeting between Lauren and Rory while Rick Brennan made his signage case, she looked at it directly for the first time.

She wanted this. She wanted him specifically. Not the idea of someone, not the comfort of a warm presence, him. Shane. The man who fixed things without being asked and said it’s fine when it wasn’t and fixed the window she’d mentioned to nobody in particular at seven in the morning before anyone was there to see him do it. The man whose face had gotten better every single time she looked at it. The man who had spent four months looking at her in the way that said everything he wasn’t saying.

The wanting was not small.

She’d known this for a while without letting herself know it.

She let herself know it now, in a folding chair in the Merrybrook Elementary gym, between her best friend and the town historian, while Rick Brennan argued about font sizes.

Lauren leaned over. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Allison said. “Just thinking.”

Lauren looked at her with the honest face. Said nothing. Which was everything.

* * *

The meeting ended at eight fifty and people dispersed in the slow Merrybrook way, conversations continuing in the parking lot and the hallway for twenty minutes after the official end.

She stayed to help stack chairs. She always stayed to help. And gradually the gym emptied (Rory talking about something they’d remembered, Lauren leaving with a look that contained a complete sentence Allison chose not to read right now) until the gym was quiet.

She was working through the last row when she heard the scrape of a chair from the other side of the room.

She turned.

Shane was there, taking down the last of the chairs she hadn’t gotten to yet, working through them with the efficient quiet of a man who simply saw what needed doing and did it. He’d been at the meeting (she’d been aware of him the whole evening in the peripheral way she was always aware of him) and he’d stayed the way she’d stayed. Without deciding to. Just still there.

He stacked the last chairs without looking up.

She stacked her last two.

The gym was done.

He turned off the overhead lights on the way out. She turned off the Thanksgiving string lights. The gym went dark behind them.

* * *

Outside was a different world.

It had snowed while they were in the meeting (she hadn’t known, no windows in the gym) and Main Street was white, the sidewalks blanketed, the parked cars outlined in soft accumulation, the whole of Merrybrook gone quiet under it the way towns went quiet under snow, the hushed quality of a world that had been muffled at the edges. The snow was still coming down lightly, small steady flakes in the orange glow of the street lamps, settling without hurry.

She stopped in the doorway and looked at it.

“Snow,” she said softly.

“While we were inside,” he said.

She stepped out into it. The snow compressed under her boots with the sound it made when it was fresh and undisturbed, and the cold hit her face and she looked up at the sky where the snow was coming from, dark and close and delivering something, and felt, in the way she’d been feeling things in Merrybrook since August, like this was exactly what the night was supposed to be.

Their breath made clouds in the cold.

The school parking lot had two cars in it, hers, his truck at the far end, and between them and Main Street the snow lay unbroken.

“Which way are you?” he said.

“Lakeview,” she said. “You?”