The Lake Cottage Off-Season

Piper Byrne was thirty-four years old and had never once driven a car, which was a fact she'd been dodging at parties for a decade. She'd taken the train up to the Lake District on a Friday in late October, off-season, when the lake was gray and flat and the tourists had all gone home, and she was hauling a duffel bag and a tote of library books up a gravel path when she heard the front door of the cottage bang open.

"There she is!" Vincent Duffy shouted, like she couldn't see him standing right there on the step. He was thirty-six now, taller than she remembered, still with the forearms of a man who hung off windows for a living.

"Hi, Vinnie." She dropped the bags and hugged him, and it was a nice hug, a long one, and neither of them made it weird. Mostly.

"Okay, so, house tour, but first, introductions. You remember Omar."

She did remember Omar. Omar Brownlow was thirty-five now, and he'd been the one teaching the reference cataloging class back in library school when she was twenty-seven, and she had spent an entire semester pretending to be confused about the Dewey decimal system so he'd come over to her desk. They'd kissed once, at a mutual friend's party when she was twenty-eight, on a porch, and then he'd moved to Kumar and nothing more came of it. He was standing there in a canvas jacket with a thermos in his hand, looking exactly like her type, which was annoying.

"Hi, Piper," he said.

"Hi, Omar. You look good."

"You look good too. Still driving, I hear. Sorry, still not driving, I hear."

"That's the one."

"And this is Farah," Vincent said, pulling forward a woman with cropped hair and reading glasses pushed up on her head. "Farah Samuelson, my partner. She's a librarian too, so if you two start cataloging at each other, we're leaving you both in the lake."

Farah laughed and shook Piper's hand with a grip that meant it. "Thirty-two, librarian at the Ambleside branch, and honestly, the cataloging threat is real. I will do it. Piper Byrne, right? I've read your collection policy for the county archive. It's good work."

"Okay, she's staying forever," Piper said. "Sorry, Vinnie, you've been replaced."

The cottage itself was Vincent's family's, a squat stone thing with a wood stove and a smell of cold ash and old blankets, and inside, on a desk under the window, sat a typewriter. Piper noticed it immediately because she noticed every typewriter, occupational hazard, and this one had a gap where the letter e should have been.

"The e is missing," she said, before anyone had even taken her coat.

"Yeah," Vincent said. "It's been like that since my gran owned the place. Supposedly she pried it off herself and mailed it to somebody as a joke. Nobody knows who."

"That's an unfinished mystery. I'm going to think about that all weekend."

"That's the point of the weekend," Farah said. "Driving lessons and unresolved typewriter mysteries. That is the complete itinerary. We made a poster."

There was no poster, but Piper liked her already, which was a strange feeling to have about her ex's current partner, and she decided not to examine it too hard.

Lunch was soup and half a loaf of bread, and talk went the way talk goes when four people haven't all been in a room before, careful and then suddenly not careful. Omar told a story about a student who'd driven his Morris Minor into a sheep shed, slowly, over forty minutes, and Piper laughed until she had to put her spoon down.

"Okay, so, lesson one," Omar said, pushing his bowl away. "I was thinking we do the quiet loop past the boat launch. Nothing there in October but sheep and one very confused swan."

"Today?" Piper asked. "I haven't even finished my tea."

"You've never finished your tea on time in your life. I remember. You'd come to office hours with a full mug and leave with a full mug."

"You remember my tea habits?"

"I remember everything about office hours," Omar said, and then he looked at the table, and Vincent looked at Farah, and Farah looked at her reading glasses like they'd said something interesting, and Piper understood that some kind of conversation had already happened about her before she'd gotten off the train. She filed that away.

The car was a battered little hatchback that Farah said belonged to the cottage and had belonged to the cottage since roughly the invention of cars. Piper got in the driver's seat and put her hands at ten and two, and Omar got in beside her and did not make fun of her for gripping the wheel like it owed her money.

"Clutch down, turn the key," he said. "Nice and slow."

She stalled it twice on the gravel, which he said was practically tradition, and then they were rolling, bumping down the lane with the lake flashing gray through the trees on her left. He was a good teacher, patient, no sharp grabbing at the wheel, just a calm voice saying second gear now, listen to the engine, it'll tell you.

"This is not horrible," she admitted, at a whole twenty miles an hour.

"You're doing better than most first-timers. You're also white-knuckling so hard I can hear it."

"Am not."

"Your knuckles have their own opinions," he said, and she laughed, and the laugh made her steer a little wide around a bend, and he just said easy, that's it, easy, in that same warm voice, and something in her chest went sideways. The old crush came back like it had been in the seat behind them the whole time, just waiting.

They stopped at the pull-off by the boat launch so she could breathe, and the swan was there, floating around looking offended. Omar poured her a cup from the thermos, tea, he'd remembered, and they stood at the rail with the wind pushing at their jackets.

"Can I ask you something?" he said. "And you can tell me it's none of my business."

"That's usually how asking works, yes!"

"The porch. At Val's party, years back. I've thought about that kiss more times than I'd admit to most people. Was it just a party thing, or did I ruin something by leaving?"

Piper looked out at the water. "You didn't ruin anything. I was twenty-eight and I was scared, mostly. You were my teacher that year, that was the entire problem, and then you left, and I told myself it didn't matter." She took a sip of tea. "It mattered a bit."

"Yeah," he said, quiet. "It mattered a bit on my end too. I applied for that Kumar job on purpose and then regretted it on the train up."

"You could have called."

"You could have called too."

"Fair. We were very stupid."

"We were very twenty-something," he said, and they stood there while the swan drifted past them like it was eavesdropping, and then he said, "So I should know, before anything goes any direction at all. Vincent says you know about him and Farah. How they do things. Is that something you're actually okay with, or are you just being polite about it?"

Piper turned that over honestly, which was her habit with big questions, turn it over like one of the archive's boxed ledgers. "I'm actually okay with it. I've been thinking about it since he wrote to me. Maybe longer than I've admitted to myself." She looked at him. "And you? This isn't a you're-dragged-along thing?"

"I'm not dragged anywhere. I got invited, I said yes, I've been nervous about it since Tuesday." He smiled at the lake. "Nervous is fine. Nervous means it matters."

Back at the cottage, she parked the hatchback badly and Omar said parking was a problem for future Piper, and they came in cold-handed to find Vincent had lit the stove and Farah had made actual proper scones, which felt like showing off.

"Well?" Farah asked. "Did she kill anyone?"

"She stalled twice and drove beautifully," Omar said.

"He's lying," Piper said. "The swan judged me."

"The swan judges everyone," Vincent said. "He judged my whole childhood."

Later, while Omar and Farah argued pleasantly about whether the typewriter's missing e could have been mailed anywhere without a stamp, Vincent showed Piper her room, the small one over the kitchen with a quilt and a lamp that leaned. She heard it then, through the shared wall, faint, Farah's laugh and then a lower sound, and Vincent went pink in front of her, which she'd forgotten he did.

"Sorry," he said. "We, uh. The walls in this place."

"It's fine, Vinnie." And she meant it, and she also felt her ears go warm, and the weekend had two more days in it, and the e was still missing, and everyone under this roof was grown and had said yes to something, and Piper hung her coat on the leaning door hook and went down to the scones.

Piper didn't sleep right away. The cottage had gone quiet in that particular off-season way, no traffic, no neighbors, just the stove ticking down and the lake doing whatever the lake did at night, which was apparently nothing, loudly. She'd read ten pages of the paperback she'd brought and put it face down on the quilt when she heard it.

Through the wall. Farah's voice first, low, a word she couldn't make out, then Vincent's laugh, breathless, and then a sound from Farah that was not a laugh at all.

Piper lay very still. The walls were thin, she'd known that since the door hook, but this was different, this was Farah saying something sharp and sweet and then Vincent saying her name like a question, and the bed in the next room creaking in a slow, deliberate rhythm. Piper's whole body did the thing her body did when she was embarrassed and interested at the same time, which was heat in the face and a very specific pull lower down, and she stared at the leaning lamp like it had answers.

"Oh, that's not fair," she muttered to the ceiling.

Then something slid under the door. A folded piece of paper, slid right across the floorboards, and Piper sat up so fast the quilt slid off. She padded over and picked it up. The handwriting was looping, confident, unmistakably Farah.

*If you're listening anyway, you might as well enjoy it. We don't mind. Door stays shut, nothing comes in unless you knock. F.*

Piper read it twice. She laughed, alone, at half eleven at night, in a stone cottage in the middle of nowhere, holding an invitation to eavesdrop written by a librarian. Then she went back to bed, left the lamp on low, and did exactly what the note suggested, hand down the front of her knickers, listening to the wall, coming quietly with her fist pressed against her mouth while Farah made a sound like a kettle reaching the boil.

Afterwards she lay there sweating and grinning at the ceiling. "Well," she told the room. "That's one way to catch up with old friends."

* * * * *

Saturday arrived, and Piper came downstairs at nine to find Farah already at the counter with flour on one cheek and a look of pure competence.

"Sit," Farah said, pointing at a stool. "You're on butter duty."

"I didn't know there was butter duty."

"There's always butter duty. Vincent burns things and Omar eats them and pretends they're fine, so someone has to be the grown-up." Farah slid a bowl across and their fingers brushed and Farah did not move hers away for a beat longer than strictly necessary. "Sleep well?"

Piper felt her ears go warm again. "Actually, no. Not exactly!"

"No?" Farah's mouth curved. "Trouble sleeping?"

"You know exactly why."

"Say it anyway," Farah said, stirring, watching her sideways. "I like hearing it."

"You slipped a note under my door."

"Did it work?"

Piper laughed and looked down at the butter. "It worked embarrassingly well. You two are very," she waved the knife, "audible."

"Good. It was partly for you, the second half." Farah said it plainly, like reporting the weather. "That's how we do things, you know. Out loud. Nobody gets to wonder."

"That's very efficient."

"I'm a librarian, Piper. Cataloging is my love language." Farah bumped her hip against Piper's on the way to the oven, and it was definitely not necessary, the kitchen was huge, and both of them knew it. "So. Vincent had an idea for after lunch. He wants to run it past everyone."

"What kind of idea?"

"The kind where nobody has to be the bold one," Farah said. "It's a good system. I invented it."

Vincent appeared smelling of woodsmoke with Omar behind him carrying an armful of split logs, and the four of them ate scones and eggs and argued about whether jam went on first or cream went on first, which Piper learned was a genuinely divisive issue in this household. Then Vincent cleared his throat, which was when Piper realized he'd been nervous all through breakfast.

"So," he said. "I found the board games in the cupboard under the stairs. Gran's old ones. And I thought, well. We could play one. After lunch."

"A board game," Piper said.

"With rules," Farah added, folding her hands like a chairperson. "Very clear rules. Anything the game asks for, you can decline, and declining costs nothing and nobody asks twice. But nothing happens unless the game asks first. Takes all the pressure off everyone."

"What kind of game asks things?" Omar asked, though Piper noticed he wasn't reaching for his coat or making an excuse, so she figured he had a fair idea.

"A game I'm going to make up on the spot," Farah said, "with dice and a lot of cheek. Everyone's grown. Everyone can say no. That's the entire pitch."

Piper looked around the table. Vincent, pink again. Farah