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She had been looking at him for four months and she was still not used to it. The breadth of him filling her doorway. The dark hair gone a little damp from the snow. The flannel, which was one of the six, obviously, because he only owned the six, but she could tell it was the best one. It had the look of a shirt someone had stood in front of a closet and thought about.

He had thought about it.

Something in her chest turned all the way over.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.” He held out the bag. “Joseph said you’d want the bread.”

“Joseph knows you’re here?”

He gave her a look that said this is Merrybrook, which was fair.

“Everyone knows I’m here,” he said.

She laughed, and some of the tightness went out of her shoulders, and she stepped back to let him in.

* * *

He took his boots off at the door without being asked. He noticed the candles. She watched him notice them. He did not say a single word about them, and she could have kissed him for that alone.

She was going to kiss him for other reasons later. She was aware of this. She was trying very hard not to be aware of this while standing at the stove.

“Can I help,” he said.

“No. Sit. You’re a guest.”

He sat at the kitchen table. The same table where he had told her about Roy and the letter in the drawer the night before, in the dark, with the storm going. It looked different with him sitting at it now, in candlelight on purpose instead of candlelight by necessity. It looked like something she wanted to keep.

She took the chicken out. It looked like chicken. It looked, if she was being honest, like chicken made by a woman following a numbered list with enormous care, which was exactly what it was.

She was spooning the vegetables onto plates when she heard a small click behind her.

She turned around.

He was standing at the cabinet beside the fridge, the one with the door that had hung a little crooked since August, the one she had stopped even seeing. He had a screwdriver. She had no idea where the screwdriver had come from. He was turning a hinge screw a quarter turn with the calm focus of a man who could not sit in a room with a crooked thing and leave it alone.

He opened the door. He closed it. It closed straight.

He looked at her.

“It was crooked,” he said.

She stood there holding a serving spoon and felt something so big move through her that she had to set the spoon down on the counter.

Nobody had ever fixed her cabinet door before. It was a silly thing to feel anything about. It was one hinge. It was a quarter turn of one screw. And she was standing in her kitchen in a green sweater she had changed into three times, looking at a man who had been inside her house for eleven minutes and had already made it better, and she thought, with total and terrifying clarity:

Oh no. I am so gone.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Mm,” he said, and slid the screwdriver back into his jacket pocket, which answered where it had come from, and sat back down.

Then he looked past her at the wall over the table, where she had hung the little painting of the lake she’d finished in November.

“That’s crooked,” he said.

“It’s level.”