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He believed her.

They stood with their coffee and looked at the house. The morning light did it no favors—the peeling paint showed starker in the gray, the sag of the porch unmistakable, the cobweb in the upper corner so elaborate it had become its own kind of landmark. And yet. The proportions were still right. The turret still sat where it had always sat, the wraparound porch still suggested mornings with nowhere urgent to be, the bones of it still held. He’d looked at a lot of buildings in this town by now. He hadn’t thought much about any of them.

He thought about this one.

Rachel was quiet beside him in the way she got quiet when she was actually thinking, not performing thinking, and he’d learned the difference. She was looking at the second floor. The window with the best light.

An old man came around the corner.

He had a walker, the folding aluminum kind, and he moved slowly, the patience of a man who’d stopped fighting his own pace. His hands were mottled with age spots, and his face showed that he had been through a great deal and arrived at contentment on the other side. He stopped at the fence and squinted at Keith.

“Huh.” He studied him with a directness that most people his age had given up on. “Who are you?” His voice was oddly high pitched and brittle.

“Keith Larsson, sir. Chief deputy at the sheriff’s office.”

“Well, well.” He nodded, head still bobbing slightly after the motion should have stopped. He turned to Rachel with a different quality of attention—curious, bright, still sharp. “And who do we have here?”

Rachel shifted her coffee to her left hand and held the right one out. The old man let go of the walker’s handlebar with some effort, slow and careful, and shook it.

“Rachel Grant. I’m from Texas, sir.”

“Now that’s a long way yonder.”

“Yes, sir.”

He giggled—a dry, pleased sound, unexpected from a man his size—and then patted Keith on the arm twice. “You’ve bitten off more than you can chew, boy.” He retrieved his grip on the walker and shuffled on, down the sidewalk until he reached the corner and turned and was gone.

Keith stared after him.

“What,” Rachel said, “was that?”

“No idea.”

She turned to look at him, and her eyes crinkled at the corners—real, unguarded, the kind of laugh she didn’t bother to hide. He kept his face straight. It took some work.

She looked back at the house. Sipped her coffee.

“Your plane,” he said.

A pause. She set her cup on the fence post, easy and unhurried, like she had all the time there was. “I could come back, you know.”

His chest did something that reminded him of his sister’s chickens, fluttering agitatedly, stupid, entirely without his consent. “You could.”

“You need someone to make sure you pick the right kind of house.”

He looked at the Morrison place. The porch that needed work. The eighty years of deferred maintenance and the bones underneath it that hadn’t moved. “That much is true. I’d be hopeless alone.”

“So why don’t I miss my flight?”

“Why don’t you?”

She picked her coffee back up. Looked at the house. He looked at it too, and he was beginning, slowly, against everything he’d promised himself when he’d driven into this valley, to see what she saw when she looked at it.

“Just as long as you need me around,” she said.

“Not a minute longer.” He paused. “Might take a while, though.”

He set his coffee on the fence post. “I love you.”