November came in grey and kept its grey. The gold was gone from the shore, the lake settling into its long cold patience, the reeds standing brown and dry where the dock had stood, and the first ice formed along the margins in the second week — thin, dark-edged, holding the sky's pale light and giving none back. The house closed in around the stove, the way the house closed in every year, and the wood Benjamin had stacked in the summer began to earn its keep, and the evenings found their winter shape: the fire, the lamp, the book in the middle of the table.
The book was still there. It had not moved since October. Sophie set the coffee down beside it in the mornings the way you set things down beside a thing you are keeping an eye on, and Aaron had stopped noticing it was there, the way you stop noticing a fire in a house, and then began noticing it again, the way you do with fires.
