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Lottie watched him go from the meeting hall doorway until he turned toward the camp road. Then she returned to the table, where the track drawings waited beside the new field pages.

Cornelia came in through the side door a moment later, carrying exactly no inkpot and looking entirely unsurprised.

“How was the church office?” Lottie asked.

“Very restful.”

“You did not go there.”

“No.”

Lottie sat and picked up Peterson’s drawing of the deer track. “He said his mother kept pressed flowers in her Bible.”

Cornelia’s teasing softened into something gentler. “That was generous of him to tell you.”

“I know.”

“And the meadow?”

Lottie looked toward the open door, where sunlight lay across the floor in a bright, slanted shape.

“He showed me what belongs here,” she said.

Cornelia sat beside her. “Did that help?”

Lottie touched the blank field page, already imagining where the pressed rose would go when Peterson brought it back.

“Yes,” she said. “I think it did.”

By evening, Lottie had copied his track drawings neatly onto the first field page and left space for the rose. She did not write his name below the sketches. Not yet. Peterson was still the only name he had given the ledger, and she would honor that.

Beside the blank place reserved for the pressed wild rose, she wrote in small careful letters: Proof of summer for winter.

Then she closed the field pages and set them on the shelf.

Outside, the camp road faded into dusk, and somewhere up among the pines, Peterson had two of her books and one flower held safe between them.

It was not courtship in any form Mrs. Beck would recognize.

Lottie was thinking she did not mind.

Chapter Ten

June 26, 1886 — The Meeting Hall

By Saturday morning, Lottie had learned a town preparing for Independence Day behaved much like a henhouse after a fox sighting.

Everyone had important opinions. Everyone wished to be useful. No one walked in a straight line.

Mrs. Schulte arrived at the meeting hall with a list of supplies for bunting, hymnals, chair placement, lemonade distribution, and acceptable patriotic enthusiasm. Mrs. Beck followed with two baskets of ribbon and three unnecessary suggestions for where romance might be improved by garlands. Mrs. Hanford brought a copy of the Declaration of Independence, a jar of paste, and a warning that public readings could become dangerous when young people were encouraged to emote.

Lottie stood beside the library shelf with the lending ledger open and wondered if Wild Rose Ridge understood how close it lived to civic collapse.

“The library table should be placed near the front,” Mrs. Beck said. “Everyone will see the books when they come in.”

“Too near the front encourages handling,” Mrs. Hanford replied.

“Handling is the purpose of books.”