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“Thank you,” she said, to Margaret.

“Don’t thank me,” Margaret said. “Go home and wait for him to do the next thing. He will do the next thing. He always does.”

* * *

She walked home on Lakeview Lane in the early December dark, the snow crisp under her boots, the spruce trees breathing above her, the gap where the lake showed through gone silver and blue in the last of the light.

She had the courage book in her bag.

She had Margaret’s voice in her head.

She had, she realized as she turned onto Lakeview Lane and saw the cottage with its blue shutters and the porch where she’d sat for forty-five minutes the night before. She had the feeling of someone walking toward something rather than away from it.

Which was new.

Which was, she thought, exactly the point.

She went inside.

She made tea.

She sat at the kitchen table with the carved sparrow and the dried flower crown and the courage book and her tea and looked at the lake through the window and waited, in the way Margaret had told her to wait, not anxiously, not with her breath held, just, open.

Ready for the next thing.

Chapter 21

The Storm

The storm arrived on a Thursday.

She knew it was coming. Helen had sent an email the previous afternoon canceling classes for Thursday and Friday, and Lauren had texted her a list of things she should have in the cottage that she definitely didn’t have, and Rory had stopped her on Main Street on Wednesday to explain, at length, the meteorological history of December storms in the Merrybrook valley, which had been both informative and slightly alarming. She’d gone to the market. She’d gotten what she thought were the right things. She’d felt reasonably prepared.

She had not been prepared.

The storm arrived in the night and by morning it was doing things she hadn’t known weather could do, the wind finding every gap in the old cottage windows, the snow coming sideways rather than down, the temperature dropping with a speed that felt personal. She’d woken at six to the quality of silence that meant the power was out, confirmed this by discovering that the lamp beside her bed did nothing when she clicked it, and gotten up to find the cottage considerably colder than it had been when she’d gone to sleep.

She stood in her kitchen in her coat (she’d put on her coat over her pajamas because it was the warmest thing immediately available) and looked at the dark stovetop and the dark coffee maker and the dark everything and thought:

I need Shane.

Not in the breathless way she’d been thinking about him since Tuesday. In the completely practical way of someone who was cold and had no heat and no coffee and no idea what to do about either.

She picked up her phone.

She stared at his name in her contacts (she had his number because he’d given it to her months ago in case anything needed fixing at the school, and she had not used it for anything personal, and she was not going to examine too carefully how many times she’d looked at it in the last week) and typed: Power’s out and I think there’s something wrong with the backup heat. I don’t know what I’m doing.

She sent it.

Three minutes later: On my way.

She put her phone down.

She stood in her kitchen in her coat and felt, underneath the practical relief, a warmth that had nothing to do with the temperature.

* * *

He arrived twenty-five minutes later, snow-covered and carrying things, a box, tools, something she couldn’t identify, and she opened the door and he came in and looked at the cottage the way he looked at everything that needed his assessment: systematically, starting with the most urgent thing.