Still Waters

Nancy Albright has run the Loon's Rest, a six-room inn on Birchwood Lake, for most of her life. She is good at it. She is good at everything, which is how nobody noticed that she stopped feeling anything five years ago, the morning her husband died.

Nancy is also a witch, though she has never once said so out loud. The lake does whatever she feels. So she asked it to go still, and it has stayed still for five years, flat and quiet as a held breath, and that suited her fine.

Then the whole lake goes to glass and opens a path straight across itself, and a boat comes up it.

Dave Whitcomb left Birchwood at twenty-three to work the ore freighters, and he left Nancy along with it. He thought he was sparing her. She thought he went because she was too much. Thirty years, and neither of them ever said a word.

Now the lodge down the shore needs a boat captain, every bed on the lake is booked, and the only room left is the spare on Nancy's own side of her own house. Her dog has already defected to him.

Which is a problem, because the whole town can see exactly how she feels about it.

It is written right there on the water.