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“It’s an eighth of an inch low on the left.”

“It’s visually level. The floor slopes. You hang a painting to the eye, not to the bubble.”

He considered this with the seriousness of a man hearing a new theory of gravity. “The bubble is the eye.”

“The bubble,” Allison said, “has never once looked at a painting.”

He opened his mouth. He closed it. He did not get up.

She would think later that it was the most restraint she had ever seen a man show about a picture frame.

* * *

Dinner was good.

Not because of the chicken, although he ate two helpings of it and said it was good in the plain, unfussy way he said things he meant, and she believed him, and felt ridiculously proud of a chicken. Dinner was good because of everything else.

She talked too much at first. She could hear herself doing it. She told him about Marcus and the new painting Marcus was working on, the lake with ice creeping in at the edges, and about Sophie, who had asked if she could stay in at recess to finish a drawing, and about the supply closet, which was still a disaster but a much more organized disaster. She heard herself running on and on and stopped, embarrassed, in the middle of a sentence.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m talking so much.”

He looked at her across the table.

His eyes were brown. That was the word for them, technically, but it was a little like calling the lake blue. In the candlelight they were a deep warm chestnut, rich and unhurried, the kind of brown that seemed to hold light rather than bounce it back. She had been looking at his face since August. She had never been this close to it, in this kind of light, for this long. She found she could have kept looking for a very long time.

“Keep going,” he said.

“You don’t have to...”

“I want to hear about Sophie’s drawing.”

So she told him about Sophie’s drawing.

He listened with all of him, pointed at the thing in front of him. He asked one question, a good one, about why Sophie wanted to stay inside and finish it rather than take it home, and Allison realized as she answered that she had been quietly wondering the exact same thing and had never said it out loud. He had heard the question hiding inside her story. He did that.

She watched his hands on the table. She watched the candle move in his eyes. She watched him tear a piece of Joseph’s bread in half and hand her the bigger piece without looking, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

She was so gone.

* * *

After dinner they took the wine out to the porch.

It was cold, properly cold, December cold, and she brought out the two blankets from the couch. He took one and put it around her shoulders before he took the other one for himself, and she sat there wrapped in it feeling like something precious and a little bit foolish at the same time.

The lake was dark through the gap in the spruce trees. The stars were out, thick and close. The snow on the porch railing caught the light from the kitchen window and glowed.

They didn’t talk much. They didn’t need to. His shoulder was pressed against hers through two blankets and that was a whole conversation on its own.

At some point she looked over and caught him looking at her instead of the lake.

“What,” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. He didn’t look away.

She did not survive that either.

* * *