The second summer was different from the first in the specific way that the second of anything was different: you knew it now.
The first summer she'd been back at the ward three months. Everything had been new-again, the specific recalibration of return. She'd been watching herself adapt. Noting the differences. Running the clinical observations on her own reentry the way she ran them on patients.
The second summer she just worked.
That was the change. The ward was simply where she was four days a week and she was simply who she was in it and the fifth day was Davan's and none of it required observation.
She'd stopped cataloguing and started inhabiting.
*Took you long enough,* Solène said, on a Wednesday in June.
*I didn't ask,* Nara said.
*No,* Solène said. *But I'm noting it. You'
