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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Blue Finch
The first thing Greer noticed was the sign—The Blue Finch—peeling like sunburn, the little painted bird faded to a ghost. Her grandmother’s bakery had been shuttered for three years, a clapboard box tucked at the bend of Main where the pavement met planks, where river wind threaded through in summer and smoke curled up from chimneys in winter. The glass was clean because nobody had stopped wiping it. People tended to do that in Brightwater: keep an eye out, keep a corner swept even if nobody was coming by.
She had told herself not to cry. She'd cried in the city on the train, quietly, then less quietly when she missed her stop because a boy two rows down had been holding a cake box and she’d thought: that's where my hands belong.
A ladder leaned against the false front. A man stood on it, steady at a height she hated. He was replacing a bulb behind the tiny porch’s fixture. He glanced down; the ladder flexed; he didn’t.
“Best not to stand under me,” he said.
Greer stepped aside. “Good to see Brightwater believes in porch lights.”
“We do what we can.” He climbed down with the gentle caution of somebody who knew falling hurt more the second time. Up close, he had that kind of face Brightwater made, open but wary, lines at the corners of his eyes like threads pulled by smiling and squinting into sun. “Jonah Mercer.”
“Greer Dalton,” she said. “I’m back.”
His look caught, then moved on. “So I hear.”
