The house was quiet in the way that only early mornings allow. She set the cup down beside the window and opened the book to the page she had marked with nothing at all, trusting that she would remember, and she did. The sentence waited for her exactly where she had left it the night before, halfway through a thought about the sea.
Outside, the light came slowly over the rooftops. A bicycle passed, then another. Somewhere a door closed. None of it reached her for long. There is a kind of attention that belongs only to reading, patient and unhurried, and it returned to her now the way a tide returns to a familiar shore, without asking and without fuss.
She read on. The chapter turned toward the harbour, toward the boats and the old man who mended nets, and she followed it gladly, one line and then the next.