5. Hannah
HANNAH
The double doors of the Community Hall open onto the smell of coffee, floor polish, and someone's very confident casserole.
"There," Lily says, steering me in by the elbow. "Now townspeople have seen you, and we won't become the people who live in the haunted house and never come out."
"We've been here three weeks now, Lily."
"Exactly. Any longer and kids start daring each other to knock."
The hall is fuller than I expect for a Wednesday evening. Folding tables line the walls, covered with sign-up sheets, tool catalogs, donated pies, and a handwritten poster that reads ANNUAL HOUSEWARES SALE.
A red-haired woman spots us from behind a table stacked with paint samples and pamphlets. "You're Hannah. Lily, you didn't warn me your mom was coming." She sticks out a hand. "Ruby Bell. I own Briar Glen Hardware store."
"She talked me down from the expensive primer," Lily offers, like a credential.
"You didn't need it. That house has good structure. Bad everything else, but good bones."
People look without fully turning. Cups pause halfway to mouths. Conversations dip, then rise again around us.
"Don't mind them," Ruby murmurs. "They're deciding if you're Evie's granddaughter again or your own thing. Takes a week."
A small woman in three overlapping scarves appears with a paper plate of lemon bars. "Elspeth would be beside herself, seeing you here." She presses my hand in both of hers. "Clara Whitmore. I run the bookshop. Your grandmother and I were close. Closer than most knew, honestly."
"She never mentioned a bookshop," I say.
"No." Clara smiles, and something careful lives behind it. "She kept her people in separate drawers, your Evie. Always did. You'll find that out, restoring the place." Then, lighter: "Ask me anything about the town. I'm a terrible gossip and proud."
An older man with a white beard and suspenders has been listening from beside a table of donated tools. "You're doing the south porch yourself?" Blunt, no introduction.
"Trying to."
"Theo Maddox. I framed half that porch in nineteen-ninety-something." He doesn't shake my hand, as his are too dirt-stained to bother. "Whoever rotted out the column hid it under filler. Don't trust filler. You'll go to lean on something and meet the floor."
"I've already met several floors."
That earns me the first real laugh tonight, and some of the watching loosens into welcome.
A man in a flannel shirt eases over, coffee in hand, sheriff's star half-hidden by the cup. "Ben Holloway." He has a steady, unhurried arrival. "Settling in all right? No trouble up the hill?"
I think back to the door unlocked, the journals I don't understand, and the cellar. "Nothing a hammer won't fix."
He holds my gaze a beat past comfortable. "It's an old house, alone at the end of that road. You see anything that doesn't sit right, you call me. Doesn't have to be a crime to be worth a call."
"I'll remember that."
He nods like he knows I'm storing the comment rather than using it, and lets it go. The talk drifts, as small-town talk does, to my nearest neighbor.
"Blackwood paid for the whole roof on the church and never put his name on it," Ruby says. "Won't come to a single thing, though. Weddings, funerals, nothing."
"Generous and rude," Clara says fondly. "Both. Mr. Blackwood has always been both."
"Mr. Blackwood." Theo snorts.
"My grandmother swore the man looked the same in nineteen-sixty as he did when she was a girl," someone calls something from the coffee station, and the room laughs. Clara laughs a half-second late.
"Mountain water," Ruby declares. "Keeps you young and mean."
The side entrance opens, and the atmosphere changes before I understand why—conversations don't stop so much as recalibrate, and people stand a touch straighter. I swing round and Alaric comes into focus, and everything else blurry.
Alaric is not built for the lights glare and lemon bars. He stops just inside the hall, in black clothes as usual, perfectly still while everyone else remembers how to move.
"Mr. Blackwood." Ruby recovers first. "We're honored."
"Ms. Marlowe." He says to me, past all of them. "Your boundary wall."
"Good afternoon to you too."
"The old garden wall between our properties is leaning. The frost heave took the footing. It will come down in the next hard rain, onto your side."
"Then I'll deal with it when it does."
"You'll deal with a ton of wet stone across your only access to the back. Or you'll handle it now, while it's stacked dry."
Theo grunts approval from the tool table. "He's right about the footing. Always was bad ground there."
"It's my wall on my side. I'll have it looked at."
"It's half my wall. That's the trouble with shared lines." Something almost like dry amusement moves under the words. "I'm not offering to take it over, Ms. Marlowe. I'm telling you a thing about gravity."
"Generous," I say, echoing Clara without meaning to. A few people grin into their coffee.
His attention hasn't left me once. Not in a way I can call rude. He isn't crowding, isn't charming. He simply tracks me, unbothered, the way you'd watch the one moving part in a machine you don't trust. It should make my skin crawl. It does something less convenient than that.
I'm not doing this again. I spent years across a table from my ex-husband who analyzed my every move so he could use them.
"Theo," Alaric says, still focused on me, "you know that wall."
"Stone by stone."
"Then come before the rain. In daylight, so Ms. Marlowe can supervise and disapprove."
Lily makes a small strangled sound that is absolutely a laugh.
"I don't need supervising," I react.
"No," he agrees. "But you'd want to. I would, in my place." He inclines his head a fraction—to me, to Theo, to no one else—and turns. "Saturday morning. I'll bring the levels."
The entrance he came in closes, and everyone exhales. Conversation rushes back in to fill the space he left.
"Well," Ruby says brightly. "That's the most words I've heard out of him in a decade."
"Lucky me," I say.
Lily bumps my shoulder. "You're making that twitch thing with your mouth."
"What twitch thing?"
"The thing where you're annoyed and trying not to smile."
"I'm only annoyed." I pick up a lemon bar trying to act normal. Saturday morning. In my own garden, with witnesses, because of gravity.
On the drive home, I notice I'm still annoyed, but something tells me that it's more than that. In fact, I know it's not only that. It's that pull I feel when he's near.