Chapter One - Dark Roast

**The Copper Kettle smelled like dark roast and September, which was Hazel's favorite combination of things.

She'd been coming here for as long as she could remember, but specifically since she was nineteen and had her first truly terrible heartbreak: Tommy Briggs, who had the emotional depth of a rain puddle and should not have been given this much real estate in her memory. Jenna had slid a mug across the counter without being asked and said, well, isn't that something, which somehow meant exactly the right thing.

That was eleven years ago. These days Hazel came for different reasons. Mostly she just liked coffee.

She liked the particular quality of morning light at this hour, just past eight, when it came in sideways through the front windows and hit the worn, wood floor at an angle that made everything look like it was already a memory. She liked the corner table that nobody else seemed to want. She liked that Jenna had her order waiting before she sat down, and that they'd long since stopped performing the ritual of Hazel looking at the menu and Jenna waiting for her to remember she always got the same thing.

"Fall's coming early," Jenna said, settling the mug in front of her with the authority of someone who had been right about weather for sixty-something years and saw no reason to stop.

Hazel wrapped both hands around it. "That's what I've been saying."

"You've been saying it since August."

"I've been right since August."

Jenna made a sound that meant sure you have and moved back toward the counter. Hazel pulled out the small notebook she used for the studio: shapes she was thinking about, glaze combinations, the commissions she needed to track, and opened it to a blank page. She didn't always write anything. Sometimes she just liked having it open, like leaving a door ajar.

Through the front window, Main Street was slowly doing what it did on Tuesday mornings in September. A truck idled outside Gus's General Store. Pearl had her cart two blocks down, sorting mail with the particular efficiency of someone who had already read most of it. A yellow lab, not Biscuit, a visiting dog, was tied to the post outside the ice cream shop and looking philosophically resigned to its situation.

The maples along the far end of Main Street had started to turn at the edges. Just the tips, and teh top branches, just a warning. Vermont's version of a clearing throat: don't say I didn't tell you.

Hazel thought about the piece she'd been working on all week and hadn't cracked yet. A commission: a set of mugs for a couple celebrating their fortieth anniversary. The shape was fine. The glaze was fine. But she kept putting them on the shelf and looking at them and feeling like they were missing the thing that made them true, and she couldn't name what the thing was. That was the part about making things nobody warned you about: sometimes you knew something was wrong before you knew what it was.

She picked up her pen. Forty years…what does that look like in clay?

The bell above the door rang.

Hazel did not look up. The bell rang twenty or thirty times a morning; she'd long since trained herself to let it pass through her like weather. She was in the middle of writing worn smooth - patience - weight without heaviness when she heard Jenna say, from somewhere across the room, "Well, isn't that something."

She used that phrase in a specific way. The tone shifted depending on what she meant by it. The one she used for you've got to be kidding me was dry, clipped. The one she used for good for you, I suppose had a warmth to it that softened the edges. But this one, this was the third kind. The one that meant she was genuinely surprised. The one reserved for things she hadn't expected.

Hazel looked up.

Reid Calloway was standing in the doorway of the Copper Kettle with a duffel bag on his shoulder and eight years of absence in his face.

For one very specific second, she couldn't make her brain do anything useful at all.

She had thought about this. Of course she had. He still had family here, had had family here, she corrected herself, and she'd known for the last three weeks, since Pearl had mentioned it with the casualness of someone detonating a small explosive in a quiet room, that he was coming back to settle his father's estate. She had thought about it in a calm and rational way. She was thirty years old. She had a life she loved and a business she'd built and she'd had two real relationships since him, and she was not, under any reasonable definition, not over it.

She spilled her coffee a little.

Not a lot. Just enough that it hit the table and she had to grab napkins from the dispenser and press them down and focus very intently on that. The napkins. The spilled coffee. The way the liquid spread in a slightly irregular circle, actually interesting, the way surface tension worked, the edge of the circle darker than the center, while somewhere across the room Jenna was saying something to him in her warm, certain way, and he was answering.

His voice was the same and not the same, the way everything about a person is when eight years has gotten into them and rearranged the parts.

By the time she'd cleaned it up, he was at the counter.

She had time to look at him without him knowing. This felt both useful and not entirely fair, but she did it anyway.

He'd filled out in the way men did in their thirties. Not bigger exactly, just more fully himself. When she'd known him he'd been lean in a way that was still a little unfinished, all restless energy and forward momentum. Now he was just present. He was wearing dark jeans and a gray Henley and looked like someone who had driven a long way and either slept in the car or hadn't slept at all, and despite all of that-

He looked good. She had hoped, on some level she hadn't fully examined, that he would look terrible. Now that he was standing twenty feet away looking the opposite of terrible, she became aware of that hope and how thoroughly it had failed her.

This was not a useful observation. She wrote worn smooth in the margin of her notebook and pretended she was thinking about the mugs.

He got a coffee. He turned.

Their eyes met in the particular way that eyes meet in a room not quite big enough to avoid it, and Hazel did not look away. Because looking away would have telegraphed something she wasn't willing to telegraph. So she held it for the two or three seconds that were still neutral, and then looked back down at her notebook.

She heard his footsteps cross the floor. They paused.

"Hazel."

His voice was the thing she'd underestimated. She had prepared for his face. She had not prepared for his voice, and that felt like a significant strategic error. She looked up. He was two feet away, close enough that she could see the particular exhaustion in his eyes: not just the road, something older than that; and the careful way he was holding himself. Like a man braced for something he wasn't sure how to do.

"Reid." She was proud of how normal it sounded. Conversational. The exact register of someone running into an old acquaintance on a Tuesday morning. "When did you get in?"

"Last night." He glanced at the table, then back at her. "Late."

"I heard about your dad. I'm sorry."

Something moved across his face - not grief exactly, or not only that. Too complicated to name in a single look. "Thanks."

There was a pause. The kind that had history in it, that was shaped by everything said in the last thirty seconds and everything not said in the last eight years.

"Jenna still hasn't changed the menu," Hazel said.

She knew it was ridiculous the moment it left her mouth. Of everything she could have said.

But Reid looked at the chalkboard behind the counter, and something in his expression loosened. Just slightly. Like a knot easing a single degree. "The white bean soup is still on there."

"Jenna calls it a seasonal offering."

"It's a specialty," Jenna said from the counter, without looking up. "There's a difference."

Reid's mouth curved. Not quite a smile, closer to the shape a smile made before it decided to commit, and Hazel felt something that she'd been holding tightly for the past five minutes start to ache in a way she didn't want to examine.

"I should let you work," he said. His eyes dropped to the notebook.

"It's fine." She paused. "How long are you here?"

"Few weeks. Maybe more. Depends on the estate." He shifted the bag on his shoulder. It was a small movement, but she caught the weight of it; the whole trip condensed into that one adjustment. "I'm staying at the house."

His father's house. The one on the north side of town she'd driven past without thinking about for two years, the way you stopped thinking about most things in a small town until suddenly you couldn't stop.

"Well," she said. "You know where the coffee is."

He almost smiled again. Actually almost made it this time. "Yeah. I do." He looked at the door, then back. "Good to see you, Hazel."

She let herself look at him for one full second before she answered. He meant it, she thought. Whatever complicated things were stacked underneath it, the words themselves were true.

"You too," she said.

She watched him walk out. Through the front window, she tracked him: the duffel bag, the gray Henley, the way he paused on the sidewalk and looked up at the sky for a moment, as if checking that it was still where he'd left it, before he turned and walked north.

Jenna appeared beside her with the coffee carafe and topped off Hazel's mug without comment.

They sat with that for a moment.

"Well," Hazel said finally.

"Mm," Jenna said, which was more information than it looked like.

Hazel looked down at her notebook. In the margin, without fully realizing she'd done it, she'd written worn smooth three times. She looked at it for a moment. Then she closed the notebook, wrapped both hands around her freshened mug, and watched the yellow lab outside the ice cream shop finally convince someone to pet it.

She had a full day ahead. Clay that wasn't saying what she needed it to say, a commission that was almost there, a studio that opened at ten and wouldn't open itself.

She was fine.

She finished her coffee, left her usual cash under the mug, said goodbye to Jenna, and walked out into the September morning, which was gold, and coo,l and smelled like turning leaves and wood smoke from somewhere up the hill.

She did not walk north.**Paste your opening installment here to see it in the Lantern reader.