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I kept my hand against the glass.

I waited.

CHAPTER 17

NORA

My hand was on the deadbolt.

When he came to the window, I was six hours into a banker’s box, looking for a public program I could use on the merchant-grant renewal instead of the festival. Then I found the pay slip from my first January. Ivy had written it before anyone in town knew anything about me except my name and before I had a register or a shop. The slip read N. Winters, 40 hrs., paid in stock. I had worked forty hours, and she’d paid me in books and a wreath and let me sleep in the room behind Callahan’s for eleven nights.

I had been sitting there for a while, not doing anything about it. I had a legal pad beside me headed ALTERNATIVE PUBLIC PROGRAM, and the list had four things on it, all things I had already done in previous years on top of the festival, and none large enough to qualify for the grant.

Out on the sidewalk, Griffin held the notebook in the cold. Snow dotted his shoulders beneath my window light. I could read his lips through the glass. I found something.

I didn’t turn the lock right away.

I wanted to open the door, but I needed the choice to be mine, not a reflex to him coming back. I gave myself until a slow count of ten.

By eight, leaving him in the snow had started to feel less like a boundary and more like bad manners.

I turned the deadbolt.

The door opened, and cold air rushed past him.

“You look like you haven’t slept.”

“I slept.”

“Not enough.”

“There’s a bed above this shop.” The offer escaped before I could stop it. “I’m not offering it. I’m noting that it exists.”

“Noted.”

He stepped inside and stayed on the mat. He took off his gloves one finger at a time. “I heard the committee suspended the festival.”

“Six to two. I voted to suspend it.”

“And your grant?”

“The festival was the public program that qualified me for it. Without the festival, I lose the grant in January. Without the grant, the shop may not survive February.”

“Nora—”

“Let me finish, or I won’t.” I kept one hand on the deadbolt. “Frank voted with me. He has nine thousand dollars of holiday inventory depending on that weekend, but he wouldn’t risk holding a festival without the permits and insurance. I wanted to hate him for it. Then I understood how much that vote cost him. You went to San Francisco to keep thirty-two people from missing payroll. Did you?”

“For one week. The bank is still holding the rest.”

“Then you did what you went there to do.” I shut the door and turned the deadbolt.

“Owen called to tell me about the vote. He warned me in November that losing the festival could cost me the grant. I called it a technicality. He had been worrying about it ever since, and I didn’t have enough left to tell him it wasn’t his fault.”

I held out my hand. “Now show me what you found. I’ve spent the weekend alone with my thoughts. Give me something with facts on it.”

He set the notebook on my counter, pulled off the rubber band, and slid out the copied pages. The notebook fell open to a familiar page.

My shop window filled the page, the tree centered in its usual spot. Eraser marks showed he’d tried more than once.