She was in the coat again, the charcoal one, with her hair carrying the specific, outdoor quality of someone who had been outside in moving air, and she was holding an empty coffee cup which meant she had taken it to the lake with her and had been there long enough to finish it, and her face had the lake on it still, the open settled quality I had first seen on the balcony yesterday morning and had been looking for since.
She looked at me.
"You ran," she said.
"Forty minutes," I said.
She nodded with the satisfaction of a woman who had recommended something and was pleased to find it had been done.
"My mother is coming at two," I said.
Something moved in her face. Not alarm. The specific, calibrating attention of a woman adjusting her understanding of what the day contained.
"Before
