On Saturday morning, eleven cars are parked in the Juneberry lot before eight o’clock, and none of them came to see a movie.

I watch them arrive from the snack bar window with a coffee going cold in my hand. The Dunning sisters in a green station wagon with ladders strapped to the roof. Mr. Petrakis in the hardware store van, which is packed so full of paint cans that the back tires look worried. The young firefighter from the diner, whose name turns out to be Eli, with two friends and a truck full of folding tables. Priya, who has closed the diner for the first Saturday in six years and taped a sign to the door that says GONE TO THE MOVIES.

And Bev Lindahl, in a pair of paint-splattered overalls that look older than I am, carrying a clipboard.

“You put this in the town newsletter,” I say when she reaches the door.

“I put it in the church bulletin, the town newsletter, and the notice board at the post office,” Bev says. “Nobody reads the newsletter.” She hands me the clipboard. “Snack bar gets two coats. Ticket booth gets one coat and new shingles. The Dunnings are handling the flower boxes. You are handling the string lights, because you’re the only one here who understands electricity. Questions?”

“Why?” I ask. “Why are you all doing this? I’m still selling it.”

Bev looks at me over the top of her glasses, the exact look she used to give me when I claimed my dog ate my essay on The Great Gatsby.

“Harriet,” she says. “If this is the last show, it’s going to be a good one.”

By noon the snack bar is butter yellow instead of peeling gray, and I have paint in my hair and a sunburn on the back of my neck.

It’s been almost two weeks since I read the letter. Almost two weeks of Theo and me moving around each other in a new way that neither of us has put a name to. The rules are gone. We didn’t say so. We just stopped following them. He comes down off the scaffolding at lunch now, and we sit on the tailgate of his truck and eat whatever Priya sends over, and we talk.

We talk about everything. His dad’s jokes. My fern. The weird Ohio projector collector, who has emailed me twice since, asking if I’d sell him the Juneberry’s machine. We talk about Rosemary. That’s the hardest part, and also the best one. Theo tells me about March, the folding chair, the cocoa she kept stealing. I tell him about the Sunday phone calls. We both keep circling around the note on the envelope, and we don’t land on it, and that’s okay for now.

The one thing I don’t talk about is Denver.

I keep meaning to. Every lunch I think, today. And every lunch he says something that makes me laugh, and I think, tomorrow. Sandra has emailed me the interview date. The eighth of September, the week after Labor Day. The flight is booked. It sits in my inbox like a stone in my shoe.

Across the lot, Theo is on a ladder by the ticket booth, handing new shingles down to Eli. He’s wearing a Hollis Point Fire Department cap that someone put on his head as a joke, and he hasn’t taken it off. Lucia is on the ground, feeding him shingles and giving him a hard time about the cap.

“You’re staring,” Priya says, next to me.

“I’m checking the ladder safety.”

“Uh huh.” She passes me a roll of blue tape. “You told him about Denver yet?”

“No.”

“Hat.”

“I will. When I figure out what I’m going to say.” I rip off a piece of tape with more force than necessary. “It’s just an interview.”

Priya doesn’t say anything. For Priya, that is a whole speech.

The string lights take me all afternoon.

Rosemary had them up for years along the path between the snack bar and the playground, big old-fashioned bulbs the size of plums on black wire. Half the bulbs are broken. The other half are dusty. The wire has been chewed by something with small, determined teeth. I find three more boxes of spare bulbs in the office closet, and a coil of new wire at Petrakis Hardware that Mr. Petrakis refuses to let me pay for, and I climb up and down a stepladder along forty yards of path, splicing and testing, until my shoulders ache.

Theo finds me when the sun is going down, sitting on the stepladder with a dead bulb in each hand.

“The last section’s out,” I say. “I’ve checked every connection twice. I think it’s a bad splice somewhere, and I can’t find it, and if I look at this wire for one more minute, I’m going to throw it in the lake.”

“Want another set of eyes?”

“I want a new pair of arms.”

He holds out a hand, and I give him the bulbs, and he walks down the line with his head tilted, running the wire through his fingers. Six posts down, he stops. He wiggles something. A whole section of lights flickers on and then off again.

“Loose connector,” he says. “You did the splices right. It’s this old plug.” He pulls a screwdriver out of his back pocket, because of course he has a screwdriver in his back pocket. “Try it now.”

I plug in the extension cord.

Forty yards of warm gold bulbs come on all at once along the path, one after another, and swing a little in the breeze off the lake. It’s the exact moment the sun drops behind the trees.

Down by the picnic tables, somebody starts clapping. Then everybody does. The Dunning sisters. Mr. Petrakis. Eli and his friends. Bev, with her clipboard tucked under her arm. Lucia whistles through her fingers. Priya is laughing, with paint on her face.

I stand there under the lights with the cord still in my hand and look at the Juneberry. The yellow snack bar. The new shingles on the ticket booth. The flower boxes full of red geraniums. The screen, with its new frame, pale and huge against the purple sky.

It doesn’t look like a place that’s closing. It looks like a place that’s waiting for the first car of the night.

For one second, I let myself picture it. Summer after summer. Kids in pajamas on the hoods of cars. My grandmother’s butter. The sign flickering J, no J, J, forever.

Then I put the picture away, because it isn’t mine to keep.

Everybody leaves by nine, full of Priya’s sandwiches and very proud of themselves. Theo stays.

“I finished the frame this morning,” he says. “Five days early. The primer’s dry enough on the screen for a quick run. I was thinking, if you wanted, we could run a test.”

I know exactly what he means. My heart does something complicated.

“Roman Holiday,” I say. “We’re not supposed to touch the Labor Day print before Labor Day.”

“Just the first reel. To check the new gear under load.” He shrugs, completely innocent, except for the corner of his mouth. “For safety.”

“For safety,” I repeat.

“I’m very serious about safety.”

I climb the stairs to the booth. I don’t hesitate at the bottom anymore. I take down the first can with the red heart on the tape, and I thread the reel through the projector the way she taught me, down, around, under, loop, loop, humming a little under my breath without noticing until Theo, leaning in the doorway, very carefully doesn’t say anything about it.

“I don’t hum,” I tell him.

“Wasn’t going to mention it.”

I flip the switch. The motor starts, steady and smooth. I switch on the lamp.

Out across the lot, on the brand new frame, the screen lights up.

We watch from the bed of his truck, parked in the third row, next to post fifty-one. He brought a blanket. I brought two sacks of popcorn and the last of Rosemary’s June butter. I tuned his truck radio to the low station, and the sound comes through the speakers a little crackly and very old, the orchestra swelling up out of the dark.

It’s a black and white movie about a princess who runs away from her life for one day and falls in love with a man in Rome, and then has to go back to being a princess at the end. Rosemary loved it more than any other film ever made. When I was fifteen, I told her the ending was too sad. She said it wasn’t sad at all. She said it was about the day that makes the rest of your life worth it.

The reel runs about forty minutes. I have seen this movie maybe forty times, and I don’t remember any of those forty minutes afterward. I remember the lake sounds behind us. I remember the string lights along the path, still on, gold against the dark. I remember the way the light from the screen moves across Theo’s face. And somewhere around the tenth minute, I remember that I stopped watching the movie and started watching him.

He knows. He doesn’t turn his head.

“You’re staring,” he says.

“I’m checking your safety.”

He laughs, low. Then he turns, and the light from the screen is behind him this time, and I can’t see his expression very well. I can only see the shape of him, and feel how close he is.

“Hattie,” he says quietly. “Tell me if I should stop.”

I don’t tell him to stop.

He kisses me the way he does everything, slow and careful and completely sure, like he has thought about it for a very long time and decided to get it exactly right. His hand comes up to my face. I hold on to the front of his shirt, the way you’d hold on to a railing at the top of a staircase. It tastes like butter and salt and eleven years. When we pull apart, just a little, the reel is still running, and I have absolutely no idea what’s happening in Rome.

“Okay,” I say, which is not what I meant to say at all.

He rests his forehead against mine. “Okay,” he says back, and I can hear him smiling.

The film runs out. The screen goes bright white, and then the tail of the reel clicks around and around up in the booth, and neither of us moves to go turn it off.

My phone buzzes in my back pocket.

I ignore it. It buzzes again. And again. When it starts on a fourth round, I pull it out just to make it stop, and the name on the screen is Grant Whitford.

It’s nine-forty on a Saturday night.

“Sorry,” I tell Theo. “I have to.”

I climb down from the truck bed and walk a few steps away, into the dark between the speaker posts.

“Ms. Albrecht. I apologize for the hour.” Grant sounds like he’s in a car. “I wanted to reach you before it became official. The board met this afternoon. They’ve found another property up the shore they like, and they want to move quickly.” A pause. “So they’ve increased the offer. By a good deal. You’ll have it in writing tomorrow morning.”

“That’s good news,” I hear myself say. My voice is completely steady. I don’t feel steady.

“There’s a condition,” Grant says, gently. “The new offer is only good until this Friday, at five p.m. After that, they walk away, and they’ll build on the other property instead.”

Friday. Not Labor Day. Friday. Six days.

“I’m sorry to rush you,” he says. “I truly am. It’s a lot of money. I just wanted you to hear it from me.”

I thank him. I hang up. I stand there in the third row with my phone in my hand, and the screen is still white and empty in front of me, and behind me I can hear Theo climbing down out of the truck.

“Hattie?” he says. “What is it?”