Saturday came in with a hard frost and a sky so clear it seemed to have been washed overnight. Aaron woke early and lay still, listening to the quiet of the house, and thought about the shape of the week ahead: the last of the readings, the long drive south, the foundation visit next Friday. And the day, somewhere in the middle of it all, when she would come home.
He made coffee and carried it to the porch. The lake was silver with cold, the dock rimed white, the reeds at the edge of the water stiff with ice that would burn off by noon. He had spent the week learning the quiet, the way Benjamin had said he would. It had a shape now — the one plate, the one light, the book with the folded corner.
The book had gone with her. He had given it to her in the green room, the corner folded down, and she had read from it and carried it north. The study felt strange without it, the way a room feels when a thing that lived in it is away.
His phone buzzed at nine. Daisy.
