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Soluno, when they finally reached it, started and ended inside a minute. One wide street, a feed store, a church, a bar with a hand-painted sign that said HARVEY'S like it was somebody's front door, and a diner with a full parking lot at eleven in the morning on a weekday. Lauren read the street the way she'd read every street since she was twenty-two, one shopkeeper casing the block, and it took her half a second to find the soaped-over windows two doors down from the diner, some store that hadn't made it, the ghost sign too faded to read. Her chest did the small tight thing it did. Every town had one. She'd owned one.

"Food first," Mason said, swinging into the lot. "Nobody paints hungry, and if we drive past Pearl's without stopping she'll hear about it by noon and I'll be answering for it till Christmas."

"Answering to who?"

"Everybody," he said, like that was an answer, and it turned out it was.

The bell over the diner door rang, and the diner heard it.

Not the way a room notices a door. The way a room has been waiting for one. Conversations didn't stop so much as change gear, and a dozen heads came around with the unhurried confidence of people who had never once pretended not to look, and Lauren had half a step to take in the place, counter down one side, booths down the other, pie under glass, sixty years of grease and coffee polished into the air like furniture wax, before Mason's hand landed at the small of her back.

Light, steering, small-town manners, a man showing a newcomer through a door, nothing anybody could have named out loud. And it stayed half a beat past manners, warm through her floral top, five fingers and a palm printing themselves straight through the fabric, and then it was gone and he was saying morning to somebody, and Lauren walked the length of that diner with her spine informing her, at volume, that the hand had been there and was not there anymore.

She'd deal with that later too. The later pile was getting substantial.

"Well, if it isn't trouble," said the woman at the register, and the whole counter turned on its stools as one.

She was mid-sixties and built like a fact, silver hair set hard enough to survive weather, and she had the look of a woman who had been standing at that register since before the highway came through and had used the time to form opinions. Her eyes went over Mason like he was a delivery she'd been expecting, and then they went to Lauren and stopped, and something behind them lit up like a switchboard.

"Pearl," Mason said. "This is⁠—"

"I know who this is." Pearl came out from behind the register with a menu she clearly had no intention of letting anyone read. "This is the Merritt girl. Sit down, honey, right here at the counter where the light's good. Marge!" This last delivered over her shoulder at a volume that rattled the pie case. "Marge, leave the crusts, you'll want to see this!"

"I really don't need⁠—"

"Course you don't." Pearl steered her onto a stool with two fingers and the authority of thirty years. "Coffee?"

"Please. Just⁠—"

"Marge!"

The kitchen door swung, and a second woman came out wiping flour off her hands onto an apron that had retired several aprons before it. She was older than Pearl and moved like she'd never once been in a hurry and never once been late, and she came the whole way down the counter, which Lauren would learn later was not a thing Marge Whittaker did for everyone, and stopped in front of her and looked.

Not rude, not even curious, exactly. She looked at Lauren the way you look at a photograph you took yourself, a long time ago, and had been keeping in a drawer.

"Well now," Marge said, soft. "There you are."

"I'm sorry?"

"Your granddaddy sat in that stool." Marge nodded at it, the one Pearl had planted her on, third from the end, and Lauren went still all the way down. "First Monday of the month, rain or none. Coffee and the peach pie and not three words the whole visit, and that was fine, we don't sell words." She wiped her hands again, once, a settling motion. "Suits you."

The diner went on around them, forks and crockery and somebody's laugh, and Lauren sat on her grandfather's stool with her throat doing something she had not authorized and no earthly way to say thank you that wouldn't come out in pieces. Marge didn't wait for one. She patted the counter twice, like tucking something in, and said "peach today," not a question, and went back toward her kitchen, and the door swung shut on her, and that was the whole conversation and somehow also the most anybody had given Lauren in a year.

Pearl gave her exactly four seconds, which Lauren would come to understand was Pearl being delicate.

"So." Coffee arrived. Pearl planted both hands on the counter across from them, glanced once at Mason, once at Lauren, and laid it out like a hand of cards. "Five days."

"Pearl," Mason said.

"That truck of yours has been sitting at the Merritt place the better part of a week, don't you Pearl me, this county has eyes and every one of them drives that road." She ticked it off. "Earl's had a four-inch pump go through on your ticket, Owen was seen hauling the rig out Monday, Delia Voss says the windmill's standing straight for the first time in twenty years, and now here's the two of you walking into my diner at eleven in the morning like a couple that's been to church." She straightened up, triumphant. "So."

Lauren opened her mouth to explain about the well, the actual well, the dead pump and the receipt and the entirely reasonable economics of one truck, and got as far as "The water⁠—"

"Water," Pearl said, to the ceiling, to the county. "Honey, in Soluno a man doesn't put a pump down a woman's well because of water."

The counter, all eight stools of it, made a sound like a congregation.

"It was a hundred percent about water," Lauren said. "There was no water. Water is famously why people fix wells."