Chapter 2

The coffee was cold by the time Junie got to the park bench at the end of Main Street. She sat down anyway, set the box on the ground beside her, and took a sip. She didn't need the caffeine. She needed the minute.

The park was small — a strip of grass and a few benches between the hardware store and the old bridge that crossed the river into the residential part of town. It was mid-morning on a Tuesday, so the only other person in sight was a man walking a brown dog along the path, both of them moving slow against the hard clear sunlight. Junie watched them for a moment, then looked down at the box.

Records. Eighteen years of invoices and receipts and tax forms and payroll ledgers, the physical ones she'd kept off the corner of the counter because Marcus had never wanted a computer in the store. "The till's enough," he'd say. "The till, and you, and a sharp pencil." He'd meant it as a compliment. Junie had taken it as one. She'd done the books with a pencil and a calculator and a particular way of squinting at a page that Marcus called her "audit face," and the store had never missed a payment in eighteen years.

The store was gone now. Not the building — the building was still there, fresh white paint and a red ribbon across the door and a sandwich board reading COLERIDGE & SON, NOW UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. But the store as Junie had known it — the store Marcus had run with his hands and his laugh and his particular way of greeting every customer by name — that was gone. Wade had painted over it the way you paint over a stain, and he'd done it with the priest's blessing and the town's applause.

Junie took another sip of the cold coffee.

The second page was in her apron pocket, folded into neat quarters. She knew it by heart — she'd read it enough times over the years, checking the terms, making sure everything was in order. But she pulled it out now anyway, unfolded it, and read it again, holding it flat on her knee the way she'd held it on the sidewalk.

It was a legal description of the building, the same legal description that had been in the trust from the beginning, the one Marcus had set up fifteen years ago when the store started doing well enough that it mattered what happened to the building if something happened to him. And below it, in the small print that nobody at the ribbon-cutting had asked about, the reversion clause.

Junie read it slowly. She knew every word. But this time, with the paint still fresh across the storefront and Wade's voice still ringing in her ears — *finally, the right hands* — the words landed differently.

She heard footsteps approaching on the gravel path. She didn't look up.

"Junie."

It was Father Ray. He'd taken off the scissors somewhere — maybe he'd left them at the store, maybe he'd put them in his car. His white shock of hair was ruffled, and his face was doing the thing it did when he was trying to figure out how to say something without causing more trouble.

"Junie," he said again, sitting down on the bench beside her. "I'm sorry about that. I didn't know."