July came in hot, the way July comes to a lake — the water losing its spring blue for a deeper green, the air standing still over the reeds in the afternoons, the garden giving up its first ripe tomatoes in the long evenings when the light came low through the south wall. Aaron picked them warm off the vine and carried them to the kitchen, and Sophie made them into the things she made, and the house filled with the particular smell of a summer that is being kept properly.
The collection had begun to take shape. Sophie had claimed the study desk, the printer's pages stacked in the order of the tellings — the river, the harmattan, the fire, the origin — and the notes in her careful hand in the margins, and on top of the stack, a single page that she had set apart, which Aaron was not allowed to read yet. He knew what it was. She had told him.
"Epigraph," she had said, standing in the kitchen with her hands behind her back. "One line. It's ready when I am."
