Chapter 1 - Maeve

The town appeared the way good things sometimes do: around a bend she hadn't been expecting, tucked between the mountains like it was trying not to be found. Maeve hit the brakes on pure instinct.

She'd seen the photos, of course. Had pulled up the Briarwood, Vermont Wikipedia page no fewer than four times in the six weeks between signing her contract and today, had studied the street-level imagery until she could close her eyes and picture the general layout of Main Street. She'd been trying to calibrate her expectations. She'd been trying not to fall in love with a place she'd never been.

She'd failed.

The mountains were green in the way that only August can do: that deep, almost aggressive green before the trees start getting ideas about October. The town sat at their feet: a few blocks of brick storefronts and crooked rooflines and flower boxes that were clearly tended by someone who took it personally. A white church steeple caught the morning light.

"Okay," Maeve said aloud, to no one. "Okay."

She was forty-three years old and talking to herself in a car full of books, about to begin a job at a college she'd accepted without visiting, in a town she'd researched obsessively from an apartment in Columbus that she'd been trying to leave for longer than she wanted to admit. And she felt, with a certainty that probably should have worried her, that she'd made exactly the right decision.

She pulled back onto the road.

The coffee shop was called the Copper Kettle, and Maeve found it on the second block of Main Street without needing directions. It announced itself with a hand-painted sign and a window box of late-summer petunias and the smell of something dark-roasted drifting through a propped-open door. She parked, stepped over a crack in the sidewalk that someone had stuffed with a pencil, and went inside.

The woman behind the counter had the look of someone who had been beautiful in her twenties, remained interesting in her forties, and had arrived at her late sixties as a force of nature. Silver hair pinned back. Reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She was watching Maeve cross the room with the unhurried attention of someone doing inventory.

"You're the new professor," she said, before Maeve had reached the counter.

Maeve stopped. "How did you-"

"Subaru with Ohio plates and a backseat that's all books. Only possible explanation." She extended a hand. "Jenna. This is my place. Sit anywhere."

Maeve shook her hand. "Maeve Calloway. I just got in, actually - I was going to go to the apartment first but I needed coffee more than I needed furniture."

"Smart woman." Jenna was already pulling down a mug. "You take it black?"

"God, no. Two sugars, little bit of cream."

"Well," Jenna said, in a tone that managed to imply both judgment and acceptance simultaneously, "all right then."

Maeve sat at the counter, because she always sat at the counter when she was somewhere new. She could see more from a counter. The room was the kind of worn-comfortable that takes decades to achieve - mismatched chairs at mismatched tables, a chalkboard menu that someone had drawn tiny flowers along the edges of, a shelf of paperback books that were clearly there to be borrowed, dog-eared and cracked-spined and loved to death.

"College starts in what, two weeks?" Jenna set the coffee down in front of her.

"Two and a half. I wanted time to settle in." She wrapped both hands around the mug. "I've been in transit since five-thirty this morning. My GPS told me there was no good route to Briarwood and I'm starting to think that's less about roads and more about philosophy."

Jenna smiled in a way that suggested she found this accurate. "Briarwood decides who it lets in. You drove the whole way today?"

"I did two days. Stayed in a very sad motel in Pennsylvania."

"You'll make up for it. Your place is above Finch's Goods on Maple - I assume you've seen pictures?"

"I've seen the listing three hundred times." Maeve sipped her coffee and briefly considered that she might cry from relief. The coffee was perfect. "Do you know the landlord?"

"I know everyone." This was stated without any particular pride. It was simply the situation. "That's Roy Finch's building. His daughter Marjorie writes the town paper, such as it is. If you want to know anything about anyone in Briarwood, and I mean anything, just wait three days. Marjorie will put it in the Bugle."

"There's a town paper?"

"One page. Mostly opinion. Technically a newspaper by the loosest possible definition." Jenna refilled her own coffee and leaned against the back counter. "You're teaching English up at the college?"

"Literature and composition." Maeve turned the mug in her hands. "I've taught at a couple bigger schools, but I wanted-" She stopped, because what I wanted was a longer answer than the situation called for. "I wanted somewhere that felt like somewhere," she finished. "Does that make sense?"

Jenna considered this. "Mm. What was wrong with the last place?"

Maeve laughed, which she hadn't entirely planned on. "What makes you think something was wrong with it?"

"People who are happy where they are don't pick up and move to Briarwood at forty-whatever."

"Forty-three."

"There you go."

Maeve looked into her coffee. "Nothing was catastrophically wrong. I just- I'd been there eleven years. I knew how every day was going to go. I knew exactly what people thought of me and I knew they were wrong and I'd run out of energy to convince them otherwise." She looked up. "So."

"So Briarwood."

"So Briarwood."

Jenna tilted her head, in the way of someone reaching a verdict. "Well," she said, "you'll be fine here. This town has opinions about everyone, and it tends to be right about them in the end." She pushed a small plate toward her: a piece of coffee cake Maeve hadn't ordered. "On the house. First day."

She found the apartment exactly where Jenna had said it would be, in the building above Finch's Goods on Maple, which turned out to be one street over from Main and lined with maples that were just beginning to turn a yellowish green. The shop below sold notecards and candles and the kind of tasteful small-town gifts that Maeve immediately wanted to spend money in. She made a note to do this later, when she didn't have a car full of boxes and a coffee working through her system.

Roy Finch was seventy-something and pleasant and showed her around the apartment in approximately four minutes, because the apartment was approximately four minutes large. One bedroom, one bath, a living room with good light, a kitchen with a window over the sink that faced the mountains. The floors were old wood, a little uneven. There was a radiator that Roy warned her "had a personality."

"What kind of personality?" Maeve asked.

"Enthusiastic," he said. Whatever that meant.

She signed the last of the paperwork, shook his hand, and he left her to it.

She stood in the middle of the living room for a moment with the keys in her hand. The afternoon light came through the west window in a long slant and hit the floor in a way that made her chest do something complicated.

This was the thing she hadn't been able to explain to her sister, or her friend Laura, or the two colleagues who had taken her to dinner the week before she left Columbus and said things like are you sure and it's a big change with the careful concern of people who could not imagine choosing the thing she was choosing. She hadn't tried to explain it. She'd just hugged them and finished packing.

What she hadn't been able to say was this: the light. Not this specific light, in this specific room, which she'd never seen before, but the idea of it. The specific quality of a light she hadn't yet learned, coming through windows she didn't know the angle of yet, in a place that was all potential and no history. Eleven years in Columbus and she knew exactly how the light came through every window in the building she'd worked in. She knew it without looking. She'd stopped seeing it.

She wanted to see things again. That was what she'd been trying to say to everyone. She wanted to be the person who stopped in the middle of a room with keys in her hand and felt it.

She'd stood in other apartments on other first days. She'd talked herself into things before. She knew the difference between optimism and actual rightness, and this…This felt right.

She went back to the car and started hauling boxes.

By five o'clock she had the bedroom mostly sorted, the kitchen essentials unpacked, and three boxes of books staged against the living room wall. This was the non-negotiable first step. Clothes could wait. Furniture could wait. The books needed a home before she could function.

She'd bought the shelf at an estate sale in Columbus two weeks ago: solid oak, narrow, exactly the right depth for paperbacks, and according to the woman selling it, "made by someone who actually knew what they were doing." Maeve had believed her. She'd driven it seven hundred miles to prove the point.

She found her toolbox in the last box she'd packed, which meant it was the first one she'd have to dig through, which was the kind of irony she was too tired to be annoyed by. She located the stud finder, located a stud, marked the wall. Found the drill. Found the screws. Followed the instructions she had memorized from watching a YouTube video three times.

The shelf went up clean. Level, solid, not going anywhere. She moved back and looked at it with genuine satisfaction.

She put the first stack of books on it.

The wall, as it turned out, had opinions.

The shelf came down in one motion — a sharp crack, a small avalanche of paperbacks, a drift of plaster dust, and then silence. Maeve stood in the middle of it and looked at the wall, where a hole the approximate size of a fist now existed where the shelf bracket had been.

She looked at the hole for a long moment.

"Okay," she said.

She looked at the hole for another beat, confirming that it was exactly as bad as it looked — which was not catastrophically bad, but was definitely a hole — and made a mental note about the specific sequence of events that had led to this outcome, which was: confidence, YouTube, and the fundamental optimism of a woman who had moved seven hundred miles and was not going to be defeated by a shelf.

She was going to need a contractor.