Willow had promised the road council a mural by first frost, and she had brought thirty gallons of paint to a highway she could not picture. The longest road in Lacuna ran forty miles from the salt flats to the outer gate, and she had told every traveler she met that she would paint it into a welcome home. Now she stood at mile marker one with a dry brush and no image in her head. She tried the old tricks. She sketched a river on her palm. She sketched a face. She sketched her own hand sketching, and tore the page. Briar and Thistle had left her a jar of swamp water for luck. Jolt Jinx had wired a work lamp to a car battery so she could paint after dark. Starlight had walked the shoulder with her for two mornings, waiting for the vision to arrive. It had not arrived. A mural needed a shape before it needed a stroke, and Willow could not see the shape from the ground. She left the paint under a tarp and climbed the hill above the second mile. An old windmill stood on the crown of it, stone base, wooden sails locked still by a bent brake. She had passed it a hundred times. She had never gone up. The door gave with her shoulder. Inside, a ladder ran to a hatch, and the hatch opened onto the cap. From there the highway unrolled below her in one long gray ribbon, curving twice, dipping once, meeting the sky at the salt flats. She saw it whole for the first time. She saw where the road bent toward the river and where the shoulder widened for tired drivers. She saw the six farms along it, the three bridges, the empty billboard at mile twenty. The mural was not one picture. It was a route. She would paint the road as a river, and every place a traveler slowed, she would paint what waited for them there — a lit window, a full table, a hand raised in greeting. She climbed down with the plan set and her hands steady. At the base of the hill she uncapped the first can. The brush touched the concrete barrier at mile marker one and left a stroke of deep green. The mural had begun, and now she had forty miles to finish before the frost.

Willow finished the first mile in deep green before noon. The stroke followed the concrete barrier like a slow river, and her arm ached in a good way. She capped the can, wiped her hands on her jeans, and looked up the hill. The windmill stood where she had left it yesterday, sails locked, stone base warm in the sun. She needed to see the next bend before she painted it. She climbed. The ladder inside was the same. The hatch was the same. But near the roof, on the inside of the cap wall, someone had painted a crooked jar crowned with sparks and three squirrel tails. The paint was fresh. She knew the mark the way she knew a voice through a door. Jolt had been here. Jolt had claimed this wall. Willow had planned the largest welcome for exactly this spot — a lit window the size of a barn door, visible from every mile below. She stood under the mark and did not move for a long time. She did not reach for a brush. She did not paint over it. She sat on the plank floor with her back against the stone and looked out at the highway. The road bent twice and dipped once and met the sky at the flats. Forty miles of welcome. And above the first two miles, a sign that said something is wrong here, left by a woman who shared her bed and had never mentioned climbing this hill. Willow tried to hold both things at once. A road that promised home. A windmill that warned travelers off. She could not make them fit. She thought about painting her welcome anyway, forty miles below a warning she did not understand. She thought about scraping the mark off and pretending she had not seen it. She did neither. She took a small brush from her back pocket and a can of white from the ledge. Under the jar and the sparks and the three tails, she painted one clean arrow pointing down the hill, toward the road, toward mile marker one. She left the mark whole above it. Then she climbed down, walked to the barrier, and kept painting. The green stroke ran on. But she had decided something on the way down. Before she painted the lit window at mile two, she would find Jolt and ask what the jar meant, and why the wall above her road already carried a warning. The mural could wait one day. The question could not.

Willow drove back to the windmill at dawn with a list of questions and no answers. She had not found Jolt at the jar-nest or at the warm window. She climbed the ladder anyway, because the wall above her road still held a mark she did not understand, and she could not paint another mile until she read it in full light. She reached the cap and stopped. The jar and sparks were only the corner of it. The rest of the wall carried three faces. A girl with steady eyes. A younger girl beside her. A boy below them both. Names ran down the paint in blunt white letters. Rosa. Kai. Leo. Around the portraits, smaller words in a hand she knew from a hundred notes on her kitchen table. Last seen. Mile nineteen. Mile twenty-two. Never came home. Willow read every line before she touched a brush. Her arrow from yesterday pointed down at the road under all of it, and she understood now what the arrow had joined. She sat on the plank floor. Jolt had not warned travelers off her road. Jolt had put the missing above it, where anyone climbing for the view would have to meet them. The mural below promised welcome. The mural above said some had left and not arrived. Both were true. Willow had spent a year planning forty miles of lit windows and open hands. She had planned none of this. She pressed her palms flat to the wood and let the ache settle. She climbed down without adding a stroke to the wall. She left the faces whole. At the base of the hill she opened her truck and found the bucket of soft white she had saved for the largest window at mile two. She pried the lid. The paint caught the sun like a clean sheet. She carried it back to the first marker, where her green river ran along the barrier and the gateway stone waited for its first symbols. She mixed a little of the white into each of her other cans until the colors lifted. Then she knelt at mile one and painted between the shapes she had already planned. A welcoming hand. A warm window. Between them, a lantern with no flame. She painted a second lantern further on, and a third past that. Three empty lanterns facing the road, spaced along the first mile, waiting. She did not write names under them. The names were up the hill, where Jolt had put them. The lanterns were hers. She capped the bucket and stepped back. The mural read differently now. Welcome for those still coming. Light held for those who had not. She wiped her brush on her jeans and looked up the highway toward mile two, where the largest window was still only a plan. Whatever she painted next would have to carry both.