Amara's POV
Friday arrived with rain.
Of course it did.
Philadelphia rain was different from the rain I remembered from Northwood, the city where everything had begun. Northwood rain was punishing, the kind that lashed against windows and meant something. Philadelphia rain was more ambivalent. It just fell, steady and grey and without particular malice, as though the sky had simply decided that today was a day for water and had committed to it without drama.
I stood at the kitchen window with my coffee and watched it fall and thought about Saturday.
Tomorrow.
Eighteen hours.
Noah was still asleep. The apartment was quiet in the particular way of early Friday mornings before the school week machinery started up, that brief window of genuine stillness that I had learned to treat as it
