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What was there was something quieter. Something that didn’t have a name yet but felt like the beginning of one.
She got dressed, pulled on a cardigan against the morning chill, and went downstairs.
* * *
Breakfast was at a long table in the dining room (she was the only guest, it turned out, or the only one who appeared) and Evelyn set a plate in front of her without asking what she wanted: eggs, toast, something that turned out to be a small jar of huckleberry jam that was the best thing she’d eaten in recent memory.
“This jam,” Allison said.
“Joseph Clairmont, at the bakery.” Evelyn refilled her coffee without being asked. “He makes it every summer. The inn goes through more of it than I’ll admit.”
“Where is the bakery?”
“Main Street. You’ll smell it before you see it.”
Allison ate her eggs and looked out the dining room window at the lake, which was beginning to clear as the sun came up over the eastern ridge, the mist burning off in slow drifts. Pepper sat on the windowsill and watched it with her.
“How long have you been here?” Allison asked. “At the inn.”
Evelyn considered this in a way that suggested it was a more layered question than it sounded. “Twenty years.”
“That’s a long time.”
“It is.” She set the coffee pot down. “I came for three days.”
Allison looked up.
Evelyn’s expression was entirely neutral, but her eyes held something that might have been a smile or might have been something older than a smile. She picked up the coffee pot and went back to the kitchen, and Allison sat with that for the rest of breakfast.
* * *
She walked Main Street for the first time after breakfast, in the quiet of a small-town morning, the kind of quiet that wasn’t empty but waiting, the kind where the day hasn’t fully started yet but you can feel it thinking about it.
Main Street was one long block that curved slightly to follow the shape of the lake, with buildings on both sides that had the settled look of things that had been in the same place for long enough to stop wondering if they should be somewhere else. Flower boxes under most windows. A hand-painted sign here and there. The sidewalk was uneven in places, heaved by frost cycles over the years, and she watched her feet on the worst stretches and thought about how she’d have to learn the rhythm of it.
The bakery announced itself before she found it, exactly as Evelyn had said, a warmth in the air that reached her half a block away, cinnamon and something deeper underneath, something that made her slow down and breathe in.
Sweetgrass Bakery read the sign above the door, painted in clean dark letters. The window display had a small chalkboard in it: Today: Cinnamon Rolls. Huckleberry Scones. Fry Bread. She pressed her hand briefly against the glass like a child and then felt embarrassed and kept walking.
She found the bookshop, Thistle & Ink in hand-lettered gold on the door, and stood outside it for a moment, looking at the window display, which was arranged with a care that suggested someone had very firm opinions about it. Through the glass she could see floor to ceiling shelves, a reading chair in the corner with a lamp bent over it, and what appeared to be an orange cat asleep on the counter.
She went in.
The floors creaked. Of course they did. The smell hit her, old paper and wood and something faintly like the outside air, pine finding its way through old window seams, and she stood just inside the door and let it settle over her the way good bookshop smell always did, like a hand on the shoulder.
She was looking at the nearest shelf, local history, she realized, a whole section of it, Montana place names and settlement records and something called The Hidden Valleys: A Survey of Northwestern Montana’s Remote Communities, when she heard it.
A soft thud.
She turned.
A book was lying on the floor at the end of the aisle, spine up, that she was quite certain had not been there a moment ago. The shelf it had presumably come from showed a gap, though the books on either side were perfectly upright, undisturbed.
She walked over and picked it up.
A Woman Finds Her Way: Essays on Beginning Again.
She stood there holding it for a moment.
