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He left at ten.
She walked him to the door. He pulled on his boots, his jacket. He turned in the doorway with the cold coming in around him and the porch light on his face, and he put his hand at her jaw the way he did, warm and certain, and kissed her. Slow. Deliberate. Like he had all night and was choosing to spend this part of it right here.
When he pulled back he rested his forehead against hers for one breath.
“Goodnight, Allison,” he said.
“Goodnight.”
He went down the steps. She watched him walk to his truck through the snow. She watched the headlights come on and sweep across the spruce trees and disappear down Lakeview Lane.
She closed the door.
She leaned her back against it.
She slid down it, slowly, until she was sitting on her own entryway floor in her green sweater with her knees pulled up, and she put both hands over her face and laughed into them like a teenager who had just been walked home from a dance.
She was a grown woman.
She had just slid down a door.
She sent Lauren a single emoji, the little face melting into a puddle, then turned her phone face down on the floor beside her and didn’t pick it up again for an hour. Lauren sent fourteen texts over the course of the weekend. Allison answered none of them in actual words.
On Saturday morning her phone buzzed with a message from Shane.
Propane good?
She read it four times. She knew exactly what it meant. It meant I am thinking about you and this is the only way I know how to say it before nine in the morning.
Propane’s good, she wrote back. Friday was good.
A minute passed.
It was.
She held the phone against her chest on the couch like a lunatic and stared at the ceiling and grinned at absolutely nothing for a very long time.
* * *
She was still smiling, in a quieter Monday morning kind of way, when she walked to The Brook two days later.
It was bitterly cold, the kind that made her eyes water, but the sky was clear and the snow on Main Street was bright and clean and the whole town looked like a Christmas card somebody had taken extra care with. Pine garlands had gone up on the lampposts over the weekend. There was a wreath on the door of Thistle & Ink with a small brass bell tied into the ribbon. She had her hands in her coat pockets and her breath making clouds and she was thinking about a cabinet door and a quarter turn of a screw.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She pulled it out already smiling, expecting Lauren’s fifteenth attempt at a debrief.
It wasn’t Lauren.
It wasn’t a name at all. It was a number. She had deleted it in March, sitting on the floor of her old apartment at one in the morning with her thumb shaking over the button, and she had been so proud of herself for doing it.
She still knew it by heart.
The message said:
hi
That was all.
