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“Look at me,” he said quietly.

She held his eyes.

He drew her closer, and his hands moved over her with a care that made her throat tight, and every time her gaze slipped—every time the exhaustion or the weight of the day tried to pull her somewhere else—he said it again, the same way. Not a demand. A direction. Look at me.

She did. She kept looking.

There were moments the day tried to claw back in—the porch steps, the cold, McGraw’s name, the river—and each time, his eyes found hers and held them and the rest receded. Eventually, she understood what he was doing. He was keeping her here. In this room. Not somewhere back in an Austin parking garage with her doors locked and her phone in her hand.

She’d asked him to make her forget. He was doing better than that. He was making her present.

When she came, it felt like being held—not lost, not obliterated, but completely held, with his eyes on hers and his hands steady and the whole long terrible day finally behind her.

Afterward she lay with her head on his chest and listened to his heartbeat slow.

His hand moved in her hair. Outside, the maples went on doing what maples did in October—dropping their leaves in the dark, indifferent and beautiful.

“Keith.”

“Mm.”

“Thank you.” A pause. “For believing me.”

His hand stilled for a moment. Then it kept moving.

“You didn’t make it easy,” he said.

She laughed—short, real, surprised out of her. “No. I didn’t.”

“Go to sleep, Rachel.”

She closed her eyes. And sleep came.

Chapter 11

The Fall Market

The knitted hat was the color of fresh cream, soft enough that she’d pressed her face into it right there at the stall before she’d had any intention of buying it.

“Put it on,” the vendor said. “It’s just perfect for you.”

She was a petite Asian woman with a voice like she found everything slightly delightful, her own hair tucked under a hat in deep teal, her stall a careful abundance of wool and color—hats and mittens and cowls hung from a frame of bare branches, moving gently in the afternoon air. Blankets were folded along the front of the table, thick and soft, the kind that made you want to huddle up with a good book. Skeins of real wool hung in the back in loose bunches, undyed and dyed both, every shade the season had to offer. She had the kind of smile that made you want to keep talking.

“It’ll be way too warm for Austin.” Rachel put the hat on anyway. It sat perfectly.

“Then you’ll have to come back here to wear it.”

Rachel looked at herself in the mirror held out for her. “That is manipulative.”

“That is sales.” The woman leaned on her table. “You have someone back in Austin? Someone worth bringing a gift home to?” She reached past the mittens and lifted a shawl in deep terracotta—fine merino, almost weightless, the kind of thing that could go over a dress or wrap around bare shoulders on a cool evening. “This one travels. Works in any climate.”

“For my best friend,” Rachel said, and bought the shawl, too.

She tucked them into her leather bag alongside the wine, wrapped in paper at the bottom against the jostle of the crowd. She’d picked it up from a small winery table doing brisk business, the woman pouring samples not much older than the harvest she was selling, explaining the tannins like she’d watched every grape come in herself, and was proud of each one. Rachel had bought a bottle without trying it. She just liked the story.

She found the corkscrew two stalls later. She’d bought wine; it seemed optimistic not to have a way to open it. She picked up the grapevine handle one first—it was beautiful, exactly the kind of thing she’d have put on her own counter—and set it back down. The one she bought was sleek, modern, the kind a man with a bare kitchen might actually use.

The fall market had colonized the fields around the corn maze entrance—two long rows of stalls facing each other across a wide grassy path, strung above with lights that hadn’t come on yet but would, soon, the afternoon already tipping toward gold. She’d been working her way down one side and back up the other for the better part of two hours, and she still wasn’t done. Hand-carved pumpkins lined every surface, from the size of her fist to the size of a small child, some plain, some elaborate, faces and vines and patterns cut so precise they looked like lacework. Jars of apple butter and pumpkin butter and a pepper jelly so red it glowed. Beeswax candles in every shape. Dried flower wreaths the colors of the season—ochre, rust, dusty rose—and maple syrup in bottles shaped like leaves. A woman selling honey with a sign that listed every flower her bees had visited, as if they’d filed a report.