✦ Naomi ✦
She was back in Riverton by Tuesday evening, and the city received her return with the same magnificent indifference it had always extended to everything she did.
This had once felt like rejection. The city's vast, procedural indifference to her presence had been, for most of her life in it, a more ambient version of the Cole household's management of her — a background signal confirming that she was conditional, peripheral, lucky to take up the space she occupied. She had carried that reading for twenty-two years without knowing it was a reading rather than a fact.
She did not carry it now.
The city's indifference was simply the city being a city. It did not know her name, did not have opinions about her worth, did not administer warmth or withhold it on any particular sch
