Continued…

Voices overlapping, someone making a point with great enthusiasm, someone else laughing. The noise of a room full of women who had been talking honestly with each other long enough that they’d stopped being careful about it.

I stopped in the doorway.

I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. I just stopped because the scene in front of me was worth stopping for. The table crowded with coffee cups and open books and the remains of whatever Vee had brought over. Tiff with her hands moving. Jess leaning back with the expression of someone who had already won the argument and was enjoying the process anyway. Adrienne, who had slotted herself into this group with the ease of someone who had been looking for exactly this without knowing it. Mallory. Maggie, quiet at her end, listening with the particular attention of someone who read for a living.

And Carli.

She was laughing at something Tiff had said, her head tipped back slightly, the auburn hair catching the light. She had a coffee cup in both hands and her shoulders were completely relaxed and she looked like someone who had nowhere else to be and no part of her wanted to be anywhere else.

She looked like home.

I stood in the doorway long enough that Vee noticed me. She was at the far end of the table and she looked up and found me there with the accuracy of someone who noticed everything, and for a moment we just looked at each other. Then the corner of her mouth moved—not quite a smile, more like an acknowledgment—and she went back to her wine.

I didn’t go in. This wasn’t mine to interrupt. It was Carli’s, the way the building was, the way this whole town was more hers than most people who had been born here.

I’d be there when it was over.

I went back through the corridor and out to the courtyard. The August evening was warm and the river was doing its unhurried thing and somewhere across the water a light was on in a house I was going to make an offer on in the morning.

I sat on the bench where I’d called Graeme that first weekend, the one with the community garden behind it, still cheerfully overgrown.

My phone buzzed.

A text from a number I didn’t recognize. I looked at it. A former colleague, forwarding a message from a man named Evan Asher, Director of Strategic Partnerships for the Lagerheads, the craft brewery that had become one of the more interesting regional players in the past few years. He’d seen The Lochwell mentioned in a trade publication, something about the historic brewing site and the new investment partnership. He was going to be in Maplemoor in the next few weeks. Wondered if there was someone he could talk to about the building’s history.

I’d pass it along to Carli and Adrienne. It was exactly the kind of connection the building needed more of …people who understood what a place like this was worth before anyone had to explain it.

I’d mention it tomorrow.

I put my phone away and looked at the building. The lights in the windows. The particular shape of it against the late-summer sky, the old brewery tower and the new sections coexisting the way they had for decades, neither one erasing the other.

I thought about the first time I’d stood outside it. The hairline crack in the brick that had caught my eye. The woman inside I hadn’t found yet.

Two months.

It had taken two months to understand that some jobs changed you and some buildings changed you and some people changed you, and occasionally, if you were paying attention, all three happened at once in the same place.

I was buying a house two blocks from my mother.

I was staying.

Behind me, through the open windows of The Brewhouse, the book club was winding down. I could hear it in the change of the voices …the particular shift from argument to reflection to the comfortable winding-down that meant the evening was almost over.

A few minutes later, footsteps on the stone path.

She sat down beside me without a word. Our shoulders touched. The river moved.

“Done?” she asked.

“Done,” I said.

She was quiet for a moment. Then: “How does it feel?”

I looked at the building. At the light in the old tower. At the river beyond the railing catching the last of the evening.

“Like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be,” I said.

She leaned her head against my shoulder.

The Lochwell held us both, the way it held everything …patient and particular and built to outlast the things people worried about losing it to.

The summer evening stretched on around us.

Neither of us moved.