Page 20

Hollow Creek runs black and quiet under an old wooden footbridge. Iron hooks line the rails. At each one a lantern hangs, until the span glows like a necklace laid on the water.

People murmur and move. We find a gap near the middle. Together we lift number forty-one onto its hook. Our hands overlap, hers on top of mine, on the cold iron, in the circle of light.

She doesn't move her hand.

"Can I tell you something true?" she says. "It's not in the rules. It's just a thing I'd like you to have."

"Yes."

She looks down at the water. The lantern light moves in her glasses.

"He wasn't cruel enough to quote. That's what I always said. He never called me anything. He just... corrected. The black is more flattering. Maybe skip dessert. You're a lot when you laugh like that. Every piece of it was reasonable. Five years of reasonable. And then, this spring, he told me I was wonderful, and that I wasn't what he pictured standing next to him."

She breathes. "I wore this dress to his birthday three years ago. He said, 'Hm.' That was it. I never wore it again. After he left in May, I zipped it into a garment bag so I'd stop seeing it. I spent the next year making myself easy to be around. Easy to leave."

I don't say I'm sorry. I don't say anything for a second, because I know what she needs and I'm trying to choose it right.

"I counted your laugh tonight," I say. "Nineteen times. You put your head back and you don't hold it in, and the whole room turns around to listen. You walked around me in the basement so I wouldn't have to ask. You stood up to him and you didn't need a speech."

My voice has gone rough. "You asked if the dress was too much. I couldn't answer you. I still can't. You're not too much. You're the right amount of everything, and he was wrong."

She's turned toward me. Her glasses have fogged at the edges. She's not crying, but her mouth is unsteady. She tips her head forward until her forehead rests against my chest.

"Thank you," she whispers.

I know this feeling. It's not new. I've known it at the end of a sweep, kneeling in the dirt with a flashlight in my teeth, tracing the circuit wire by wire until the tangled mess resolves into a single clean line and you know, without doubt, which one it is. It comes with a kind of quiet. A drop in the noise.

I've known her twenty-four hours. I'm certain.

"Ben," she says.

"I know."

"I haven't said anything."

"You were about to."

She puts both hands flat on my chest, up against the lapels of the only jacket I own, and rises on her toes. I bend, and we meet halfway. It's for nobody but us. There's no audience, no man in a quarter-zip, no town.

Her mouth is soft and she kisses me like she's been keeping the words in her lips for years. I gather her against me, the warm length of her, my hand sliding into her hair, my other arm around her waist. She makes a low sound against my mouth. I swallow it. The bridge hums with lantern light under my feet.

I feel her tremble. I feel myself do it too.

When we part, our foreheads rest together. Her breath is quick. Mine matches it.

"Monday," she whispers.

"I know."

"I'm not going to say anything about it."

"Okay."

"I just want you to know I know."

"I know you know."

We stand there in the glow. Behind us the line of lanterns goes on and on through the dark, a hundred lights bobbing on a hundred old iron hooks. I've never in my life wanted anything so quietly or so badly.