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“Well,” Margaret said.

“I don’t know where to start,” Allison said.

“Yes you do.” Margaret put a piece of shortbread on Allison’s saucer. “Start with how you feel.”

Allison looked at her tea.

“Terrified,” she said. “Hopeful. Like something I didn’t know I was waiting for has happened and I don’t know what to do with it.”

“That’s exactly right,” Margaret said, with the satisfaction of someone whose diagnosis has been confirmed.

“It doesn’t feel like a good description.”

“It’s the correct description. That’s what beginning feels like.” She poured her own tea. “Did I tell you about Harold?”

“Not directly,” Allison said. “But I’ve been getting pieces.”

Margaret smiled. “Harold was the most deliberate man I have ever met. He thought about things from every angle before he moved. Still does.” She wrapped both hands around her cup. “When we were young (I mean very young, I was twenty-three) he spent the better part of a year being useful to my family. Fixing things. Helping my father with things. Appearing at events and being quietly competent and never once saying the thing that was obvious to everyone in a three-mile radius.”

Allison smiled. “That sounds familiar.”

“I imagine it does.” Margaret looked at her. “I finally told him (and I was not gentle about it, I was twenty-three and impatient and I had waited long enough) I told him I would rather have him uncertain than not have him at all. That if he was waiting until he was sure it was the right moment he was going to be waiting forever because the right moment was invented by people who were afraid of the wrong one.”

Allison sat with that.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“Nothing, immediately. You know how he is.” Margaret smiled, the soft private smile of someone with nearly fifty years of material to draw on. “He came back the next day with the most impractical bunch of wildflowers you’ve ever seen. It was March. I have no idea where he found wildflowers in March in Montana. I have never asked. Some things you just accept.”

Allison thought about a man who had kissed her in the snow without asking first and wondered if this was the Merrybrook version of March wildflowers.

“He’s careful,” she said. Not a complaint. Just an observation.

“He is,” Margaret said. “Shane is Roy’s grandson in every way that matters. Roy was the same, careful, deliberate, more comfortable with action than words. But when Roy decided something, it was decided.” She met Allison’s eyes. “I watched that man fix your classroom window before the school day started. I heard about him walking four extra minutes home every night. I saw him at the Thanksgiving table looking for you the moment he walked in.” She paused. “When Shane decides something, it stays decided.”

Allison looked at her tea.

She thought about being the woman who was never chosen first. Who had built a life around the expectation of second and adjacent and almost.

“I’m not used to it,” she said quietly. “Being someone’s first choice.”

Margaret was quiet.

“I know,” she said, with the gentleness of someone who saw this clearly and wasn’t going to make it larger than it needed to be. “That’s why it’s terrifying. That’s also why it’s real.” She put another piece of shortbread on Allison’s saucer. “The things that terrify us tend to be the things worth doing.”

Allison sat in the Finley kitchen with her tea and the shortbread and the warmth of a house that had held a long and chosen love and felt something settle in her that had been unsettled for as long as she could remember.

Not certainty. Not yet.

Something quieter than that.

Something like: this is allowed. You are allowed to want this. You are allowed to believe it might be real.

She looked at the kitchen table, the tablecloth, the teacups, the plate of shortbread, all of it the texture of a life built by two people who had kept choosing each other, small choice after small choice, for nearly fifty years.

She wanted that.

She was allowed to want that.