Page 11

"Twenty minutes." He hands me a cup. It's tea, steaming, with a twist of lemon peel curled on the lid. When I take it, the heat goes through my gloves. "Three roads in, one out toward the creek, and a very determined woman with a clipboard. I wanted the lay of the land."

"That's Bunny. She's not a woman, she's a municipality." I take a sip. Honey. "How did you know how I take my tea?"

"I didn't. She did."

He tips his head toward the donut cart six feet away, where Carmen Ruiz is leaning across a tray of sugared rings with her arms folded and her eyebrows somewhere near her hairline. She's wearing her Maple & Main apron over a leopard-print scarf. Her whole face says she has been waiting all morning to be proven right.

"Girl," she says. "You were single at breakfast."

"It was a very eventful night."

"Apparently." She jerks her chin at Ben. "I asked him your favorite color. He said, and I quote, 'Cadmium orange. She was using it at nine last night.' Who says that? What kind of man says that? I hate it. I want to marry him."

"Carmen."

"Ask him what you drink when you can't sleep."

"Chamomile," Ben says. "With honey. Even though it's terrible."

Carmen puts a hand over her heart. "It's Celestial Seasonings. It's not terrible, it's dignified."

"It's terrible," Ben and I say together.

Carmen turns, slowly, and looks at the two of us. Picks up a donut so she'll have something to do with her face.

I've been holding the cup with both hands. I'm aware that I haven't touched him yet. We said hands. We said not one flinch.

Ben looks down at my gloves, then up at me, hands his own cup to Carmen without looking, and holds out his left hand. The scarred one. Palm up, in the open air of the Common for anyone to see.

I tuck my cup into the crook of my other arm and take it. His fingers close around mine, warm and dry and slightly rough. A flat bright charge runs up my arm and settles in my chest. He doesn't flinch. I'm watching for it, and he doesn't.

A boy in a pirate hat plows into the back of my knees. Ben's hand tightens once around mine, a tiny pulse like a heartbeat, then eases.

"HOLLIS BRANDT."

The voice comes across the green like a ship's horn. Bunny Fenwick is a small, round, formidable woman in her seventies, with a pumpkin-orange blazer covered in enamel pins and a clipboard held at port arms. She parts the crowd like a prow. Stops six inches from Ben and looks up at him with undisguised appraisal.

"You're the casserole man."

"I ate the casserole," Ben says.

"Then you're committed." She turns to me. "Hollis, you've never mentioned a man."

"It's very new," I say. "Since last night. The power went out."

"She came down to the basement with a flashlight," Ben says, with a straight face I could frame. "And a knife."

"A palette knife."

"It was very threatening."

Bunny's face lights from the inside. "Oh, that's the best one I've heard since the Hendersons and the ice storm. Tell me you're coming to the Lantern Walk. Tonight. Couples carry one lantern between them, down to the creek. It's tradition, and you'll need one registered."

She writes on her clipboard with a flourish, tears off a slip, and presses it into my free hand. "Number forty-one. Don't be late. Marjorie! MARJORIE, you will not believe this!"

And she's off across the green like a missile with a pin collection. I watch the news travel outward from her in a visible ripple. Heads turning, eyebrows rising. A woman at the pie tent actually puts a hand to her mouth.

"That went well," I say faintly.