Maren counted it differently than everyone else.
Not from the alley — that was Sera and Darius's anniversary, marked privately, with no fuss, the way they'd settled into marking most things by now. Not from Rowan's birth, which the whole compound celebrated every year with increasing scale as Rowan's friend group grew. Maren counted from the night in the library when Callum Greaves had first played her own recording back to her, the night the full account had finally started moving instead of sitting locked in archive boxes for fifty years.
Ten years, this spring, since that night.
She mentioned it to nobody specifically. She simply went to the library on the appropriate evening, alone, and sat with the recording — she still had it, the original, though copies existed now in three separ
