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I got to Owen before he got to me, which I had been planning since the tree lighting. “The public-programming line,” I said.

“Filed this afternoon. Two co-chairs, one resurrected festival, and a covenant nobody in this county has read since Truman.” He tucked his program under his arm. “Your downtown merchant grant will be approved in January, Nora. I’d have told you sooner, but you were up a ladder.”

I had a whole speech. I’d started it in the crawl space under my shop, out loud, to a dirt floor and a 1974 penny.

I did not use one word of it.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me. I should have checked what that grant condition could do before I used it as leverage in November.” Owen looked at the tree for a second. “Go and find him. He’s been standing by the sleigh lot for twenty minutes pretending to count horses.”

He was, in fact, pretending to count horses.

“Two,” I said. “It’s always two.”

“I’m establishing a baseline.”

I stood next to him and put my shoulder against his arm, and neither of us said anything for a while, and the harness bells rang every time Maple shifted her weight.

His gaze dropped to my hand. “You’ve checked that pocket three times.”

I touched the corner of his lease through my coat. “I spent five days waiting for you to come back. Then I spent two weeks waiting for you to change your mind about staying.”

“I haven’t.”

“I know.” I looked at the rebuilt stage, the sleigh lot, and every person he had chosen to stand beside.

“Is the lease helping?”

“A little.”

“What helped the rest?”

I looked at him. “You’re still here.”

His fingers closed around mine.

I held on. “I love you,” I said.

I said it before I could plan a better setting. It came out beside a horse, with the choir warming up two hundred feet away. That was probably why it came out at all.

His hand tightened around mine. “You don’t owe me that.”

“I know. That’s why it counts.”

“I love you too.” He said it plainly, as though he had been waiting for me to catch up.

Then, because he could not help himself, he said, “For the record, I told you I wanted to come back to you at eleven forty-seven on the morning of December fourth.”

“That was not the same as I love you.”

“It was the first draft.”

“Griffin.”

“I improved it in person.”

I put my forehead against his coat, which smelled of woodsmoke and sawdust, and laughed until my eyes watered. He stood there, resting one hand between my shoulder blades. “I don’t know how to do this,” I said, into the coat.