"He can ask," Sylvia said, setting the basket down. "Asking is free."
Olive laughed and counted out the coins, and then, because Olive was Olive, she did not let Sylvia leave without sitting down for a cup of coffee. It was the one social appointment Sylvia kept without fail, and the one she never admitted to needing. They talked about the inn's guests, about the price of sugar, about the mine's new foreman, who was said to be honest and therefore already unpopular with the men who had profited from the last one. They did not talk about Henry. Olive had known better, from the first week, than to make Sylvia's grief the subject of conversation; instead she made Sylvia's work the subject, and that was a kindness with a longer reach than any condolence. When Sylvia rose to go, Olive pressed a small parcel into her hands — tea, the good kind, from a shipment that had come in on the morning train.
"For the winter," Olive said. "You'll want something hot when the snow comes."
Sylvia thanked her and walked home with the parcel tucked under her arm, and the thought followed her down the lane like a second shadow: that there were people in Copperton who would notice if she vanished. Not many. But some. Olive. Emil at the depot. The schoolteacher who bought a pie every Friday. It was a thin sort of company, measured in transactions, but it was company all the same, and she told herself it was enough. She had told herself that so often that the sentence had worn smooth in her mind, like a stone handled too many times.
At home she put the tea on the pantry shelf beside the jars of preserves, and her hands, moving among the familiar rows, remembered Henry without asking her permission. Henry had built those shelves in the first year of their marriage, when the cottage was new and they were young and the whole valley seemed to be waiting for them to fill it. He had been a quiet man, a carpenter by trade before he took work at the depot office, and he had loved this house the way some men love a horse: not with speeches, but with attention. He fixed what broke. He oiled what squeaked. He planted the orchard tree by tree, saying that a man who plants an apple tree is betting on a future he may not live to eat from, and that this was the best kind of bet there was. When the cough took him — slow, then all at once, in the second winter of their last decade together — he had still been making plans: a new woodshed, a fence for the garden, a trip to see his brother in Helena that never happened. Sylvia had sat beside his bed through the last three nights, holding his hand and listening to his breathing thin out like thread, and when it stopped she had not screamed. She had simply laid his hand down on the coverlet, very carefully, as if he might still feel a rough gesture, and gone to the kitchen to wind the clock. That was the morning the ritual began. She had never missed it since.
She did not dwell on it now. Dwelling was a luxury for evenings, and the afternoon pies would not roll themselves. But as she worked, she thought about the winter coming, and the accounts, and the way the order book had been growing in the last year. The mine had hired more men. The inn was fuller. Olive wanted six pies a week now instead of four, and the depot passengers bought more as the weather turned cold. Sylvia could see, in the neat columns of her ledger, a future in which she was not merely getting along but getting ahead — a little coal put by, a little flour put by, the small debt Henry had left to the store shrinking month by month. Felix Donner, who owned the store and sat on the town council, kept the account himself, and he was a man who liked to remind people of what they owed him. Sylvia paid him on the first of every month, in coin, and she kept his receipts in a tin box on the pantry shelf, each one folded sharp as a letter. She had no intention of giving Felix Donner anything to hold over her, least of all a missed payment.