She was in the house on Thornridge's eastern edge.
Our house. The one with the window above the sink that never closed properly, the cedar walls, the specific slant of late-afternoon light that I had grown up in and left and seen reconstructed in a dream by something that wanted to consume me. The real version was smaller than I remembered, the way places always are when you go back to them carrying more than you left with.
The door was open. She was at the kitchen table.
I stood in the doorway for a moment. Just looked. She was sewing something, a habit so deeply embedded in her that she probably did it in her sleep, her hands moving with the automatic precision of thirty years of practice. The late light caught the thread. She didn't look up, which meant either she hadn't heard me or
