The forest path was different in January.
Not dramatically — the trees were the same bare trees, the cold was the same December cold that had simply changed its name overnight, the ground still frozen in the specific, unforgiving way of a California winter that did not get credit for its severity because it lacked the visual drama of snow. But the quality of it was different. The specific, turned quality of a new year in a familiar place — everything the same and the sameness carrying a different weight than it had carried the last time she had walked this path, which had been December twentieth, the day before the formal, the day before Room 214.
Twelve days.
She had been counting them the way she counted things she was waiting on — not obsessively, just with the honest, incorporated a
