Spring came the way spring came in this territory — not suddenly, not with announcement, just as a gradual accumulating of evidence that what had been winter was no longer quite that.
The garden came back. Maren walked in it on the first real warm morning, slowly, the walking stick on the path, and Sera watched from the kitchen window and didn't go out and didn't not go out — just held the watching the way you held something that was real and would continue to be real and didn't require intervention, just witness.
Rowan's gift kept developing.
Not dramatically — nothing about it was dramatic now, the way nothing about any well-held gift was dramatic. It had found its pace, its edges, the specific reach appropriate to an eight-year-old who understood what she carried and had begun, in he
