August arrived and something shifted.
Not dramatically — I had stopped expecting the dramatic versions of things. The significant shifts in this story had always arrived quietly, in the spaces between the observable moments, in the accumulation of small things that individually meant nothing and together meant everything.
What shifted in August was Marcus.
I noticed it at Sunday dinner the first week of the month. He was present — physically, visibly, in the right chair saying the right things eating Patricia's food laughing at Gerald's stories. But there was a quality to his presence that reminded me of something I couldn't immediately place and then could.
It reminded me of November.
The first November. The quiet weeks after he had said he was going to stop coming to the bakery. The
