Sebastian Ashford had been in Northernlight Falls for eleven days, and in that time he had spent more coin than most men earned in a year. He knew this because the shopkeeper had begun counting his bills twice before she took them. She was the first person who had smiled at him when he stepped off the coach, and he had come back to her shop every morning since, buying things he did not need so he could hear her voice. Today he stopped outside her window. Rain darkened his coat. Through the glass he watched her arrange jars on a shelf, her sleeves pushed to the elbow. Two women stood at the counter with their heads close together. One glanced toward the door and said something behind her hand. The shopkeeper's mouth tightened. She set a jar down harder than she meant to. Sebastian understood then that the whispers had reached her. He had heard them himself in the tavern last night. A stranger with a full purse and no story. A man who paid in gold and gave no trade. In a town this small, silence about oneself was the loudest thing a man could carry. He pushed the door open. The bell rang. The two women went quiet and left without buying anything. The shopkeeper wiped her hands on her apron and did not step closer to the counter. "You've come every day," she said. "I'd like to know why." He had prepared a joke. He set it aside. "My father owned mills in the south," he said. "He died in the spring. I sold everything because I could not stand to walk through his rooms. I came north because I saw the name of this town on a map and liked the sound of it. I have no plan beyond that. I keep buying tea I do not drink because you were kind to me on a day when no one else was." She looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached under the counter and brought out a small cloth doll shaped like a bat, purple, with round eyes and pink-lined wings. She set it between them. "My niece makes these," she said. "She is six. She sells them for a penny. If you want to keep coming here, you buy one of these instead of another tin of tea. A penny at a time. That is what people in this town spend." Sebastian took a penny from his pocket. Not a coin from his purse. He laid it on the wood. "I'm Sebastian," he said. "I know," she said. "Everyone knows." She did not give her name. But she pushed the little bat across the counter toward him, and her hand stayed there a second longer than it needed to. Outside, the two women were already talking to someone on the walk. Sebastian picked up the doll and understood he had bought his way in and made himself more watched at the same time.

The little cloth bat sat on Sebastian's mantel for three days before he understood what it was telling him. He had carried it home from the shop and set it there because he had nowhere else to put it. Every time he passed, he saw the shopkeeper's hand pushing it across the counter. Every time, he felt the same thing. He was buying minutes at her counter a penny at a time, and he had never once invited her anywhere in return. He had no anywhere. He had a house he had not shown a single person in town. He walked the rooms that afternoon and tried to see them as she would. The stone front looked severe from the road. Tall windows, iron work above the door, a small glass room off the side where someone had once grown lemons. Inside, the front hall was cold and empty. A purple couch stood alone in the parlor, its velvet split at the seams, its wooden feet carved into claws. The last owner had left it because no one wanted to move it. Sebastian had walked past it for eleven days without sitting down. He went out. He bought firewood from the yard behind the smithy. He bought apples and a small round cheese from a stall two doors from her shop. He bought a kettle from the tinker who had watched him with narrow eyes all week. He paid in small coin each time and said his name when asked. By dusk his arms ached and half the street knew he had a house that needed filling. He cleaned the parlor himself. He beat the couch with a broom until the dust stopped rising. He dragged a wooden chair and a shelf of books into the corner by the window and made a small nook there, cushions from a trunk, a folded blanket over the arm. He set the cloth bat on the shelf where she would see it first. In the morning he went to her shop. He bought another penny doll. Then he said the sentence he had practiced on the walk down. "I have a house at the top of the lane. I have never had anyone in it. I would like you to come for tea tomorrow, if the shop can spare you an hour. Bring your niece if it helps." She looked at him a long moment. She was counting something he could not see. "An hour," she said. "With my niece. Tomorrow at four." She did not smile. She wrote it on the slate behind her as if it were an order. But when he stepped back into the street, he understood that the counter between them had moved. He had a door of his own to open now, and half the town had watched him prepare for her to walk through it.