May came in warm, the lake taking its deepest blue of the year, the garden standing tall in its rows, the oak putting on its second set of leaves the way young trees do — in a hurry, the way things hurry when they are young and have the long end of a promise to keep. Aaron stood over it in the mornings with his coffee, and he thought about the years it would hold, and the singer who was coming to see it in June, and the book that was beginning its long walk across the water.
The third printing of the first book came in the second week, in the plain box with the printer's mark, and Sophie opened it at the kitchen table the way she opened everything that mattered — slowly, as if it had cost someone something, because it had — and the books stood in a stack on the table, the crossing that kept arriving.
"A third printing," she said.
"A third printing," Aaron said. "The first book keeps its own pace now."
