The Forzone house was on Clement Street.
It was the kind of house that had been lived in properly — not decorated, not presented, but lived in, with the particular character of somewhere that had accumulated years of actual use rather than carefully maintained appearances. The garden was slightly overgrown in the way of people who had meant to get to it and hadn't. The front path had a crack running down the middle of it that someone had filled with something that had worked for a while and then stopped working. The door had three different locks on it, installed at three different points in time by the look of them, the most recent one a deadbolt that was considerably more serious than the other two.
Tom Forzone had put that deadbolt on Saturday afternoon. Hannah had watched him do it from the kitchen window without saying anything.
Indigo arrived at six o'clock with a bottle of wine she'd bought from the shop on the main street and stood on the front path and looked at the house for a moment before she knocked.
She'd spent the afternoon with Officer Reeves going over everything she knew. The history. New York. The burning forest. Jacob Cain — his methods, his patience, his capacity for damage. She'd answered every question with the flat accurate precision of someone who had given versions of this briefing before and had learned that the most useful thing she could offer was clarity.
Officer Reeves had listened with the focused attention of someone who had spent two days dealing with the aftermath of something and was now for the first time getting a coherent picture of what the something was.
When she finished he'd been quiet for a long moment.
Then he'd said "Ms Derby I want to be honest with you about what our resources look like in a town this size."
She'd said "I know."
He'd said "I'm going to do everything I can."
She'd said "I know that too."
They'd looked at each other across the desk in the Millhaven police station and understood each other in the particular way of two people who are both realistic about a situation and have decided to proceed anyway.
She'd left at five and walked back to the hotel and stood in the shower for ten minutes and then put on clean clothes and picked up the wine and walked to Clement Street.
She knocked.
Daphne opened the door.
She was in an apron — the kind that said something about the person wearing it, which in this case said that Daphne Forzone was someone who cooked properly and didn't care whether the apron had a pattern on it. She had something on her hands that was probably flour. She looked at Indigo on the doorstep and then at the wine and then at Indigo again.
"You didn't have to bring anything," she said.
"I know," Indigo said.
Daphne looked at her for a moment with the particular expression she'd had in the family room at the police station — the one that encompassed sympathy and wariness and something underneath both of them that was harder to name. Then she stepped back and let Indigo in.
The hallway smelled like cooking. Something with garlic and something with herbs and the particular warm combination of a kitchen that had been going for a couple of hours. Indigo stood in the hallway and felt it settle around her in the way that houses with that smell settled around you and understood why people cooked when they didn't know what else to do.
"Tom's in the kitchen," Daphne said. "Hannah's upstairs. She'll be down."
"How is she," Indigo said.
Daphne looked at her. "How do you think."
"I think she's holding herself together with something that's going to cost her eventually," Indigo said. "But right now it's working and she should be allowed to let it work."
Daphne looked at her for a moment longer. Something shifted slightly in her face — not softening exactly, more like the particular adjustment of someone who had expected one thing and gotten another.
"Come through," she said.
Dinner was the kind of meal that happened when someone had cooked with intention rather than habit. Tom had made something with pasta and Daphne had made something with vegetables and there was bread that was clearly from the bakery on the main street and the wine turned out to be appropriate which Indigo was quietly relieved about.
They sat around the kitchen table — Tom and Daphne on one side, Hannah across from them, Indigo at the end — and ate and talked in the careful way of people navigating a meal that had several things underneath it that everyone was aware of and nobody was ready to address directly yet.
Tom asked about the tour. Not because he was particularly interested in the mechanics of book tours but because it was a question with an answer that didn't require anyone to say anything difficult.
She told him about the tour. The hotels. The signing tables. The three questions that all the interviewers asked.
"What are the three questions," Hannah said.
Indigo looked at her. "How does it feel to have survived. Did writing the book help you process what happened. What would you say to other survivors."
Hannah considered this. "What do you say. To the third one."
"I say that surviving looks different for everyone and the most important thing is that you don't let anyone tell you what it's supposed to look like."
Hannah looked at her plate. She picked up her fork. She ate something. Then she said, without looking up:
"What does it look like for you."
The table went quiet in the particular way of a table that has been waiting for this question and is now waiting for the answer.
Indigo looked at Hannah.
"Messy," she said. "Nonlinear. Some days better than others. Some days you think you're done with it and then something happens and you realise you're not done with it and you have to start again from wherever that puts you." She paused. "But you start again. That's the thing. You always start again."
Hannah looked up from her plate. She looked at Indigo with the inventory-taking eyes.
"Even now," she said. "Even after everything that's — even with him here. You're starting again."
"Every day," Indigo said.
Tom cleared his throat. He picked up the bread. He offered it around the table and everyone took some and the meal continued and the thing that had been said settled into the table alongside the food and the wine and the ordinary domestic sounds of the Forzone kitchen on a Sunday evening.
After dinner Hannah went upstairs.
Indigo helped Daphne clear the table while Tom made coffee. The kitchen had the particular comfortable efficiency of people who had been doing domestic tasks together for a long time and had the choreography of it sorted without needing to discuss it. Indigo found her place in it easily enough — taking the things that needed taking, putting them where they obviously went, not getting in the way.
"She likes you," Daphne said quietly. At the sink. Her back to the room.
"She doesn't know me," Indigo said.
"She likes what she can see of you." Daphne ran the water. "She's like that. Makes up her mind fast and usually gets it right."
"She reminds me of someone," Indigo said.
Daphne turned slightly. "Who."
Indigo thought about Anastasia. The cataloguing thing. The quiet attention. The way of paying attention that most people stopped doing when things got difficult and Anastasia never stopped.
"Someone I lost," she said. "Someone good."
Daphne looked at her for a moment. Then she turned back to the sink.
"I don't want her involved," she said. "In whatever — in the thing that's happening. I don't want her near it."
"I know," Indigo said.
"She told me she asked you. At the gym. She told me she asked to help and you said okay."
Indigo said nothing.
"Indigo."
"She's already near it," Indigo said. "She was near it Friday night in that car park. She was near it this morning in that corridor. It doesn't matter what either of us wants — she's already in the radius of it and pretending she isn't is going to make her less safe not more."
Daphne was very still at the sink.
"The safest thing Hannah can do right now," Indigo said carefully, "is understand what she's dealing with. Know what the sound means. Know where to go and what to do and who to call. That's not involving her. That's giving her the information she needs to survive something she didn't choose to be near."
The water ran.
Tom put three cups of coffee on the counter and left the kitchen quietly in the way of someone who had understood the conversation he'd walked into and had made an immediate decision about his role in it.
Daphne turned off the tap.
She turned around.
She looked at Indigo with an expression that had several things in it simultaneously — fear and anger and the particular grief of a parent who has understood that something is true that they don't want to be true.
"She's sixteen," she said.
"I know," Indigo said. "I was seventeen."
The kitchen was quiet.
"I'll keep her as safe as I can," Indigo said. "I can't promise you more than that. I'd be lying if I did and you'd know I was lying."
Daphne looked at her for a long time.
Then she picked up two of the cups of coffee and handed one to Indigo.
"Tom's in the living room," she said.
They went to the living room.
At eight thirty Indigo said she should get back to the hotel and stood up from the sofa and Tom stood up too and shook her hand in the formal way of someone marking an occasion they didn't have the right word for.
"Come back," he said. "Not just — come back when things are sorted. Come back after. Come to dinner again."
"I will," Indigo said.
She meant it. She surprised herself slightly with how much she meant it.
Daphne walked her to the door. They stood in the hallway for a moment — Daphne in her apron, Indigo with her jacket on, the door between them and the Sunday evening Clement Street outside.
"Be careful," Daphne said.
"Always," Indigo said.
She meant that too. In the specific way she always meant it which was that she was going to be as careful as the situation allowed and the situation had a way of not allowing very much.
She opened the door.
The Sunday evening was cold and clear. The streetlamp on the corner throwing its orange light down on the pavement. The ordinary quiet residential sounds of Clement Street at eight thirty on a Sunday.
She stepped out.
She pulled the door closed behind her.
She stood on the front path and breathed the cold air and looked at the street and felt something she hadn't expected to feel which was the particular warmth of having been somewhere that felt like somewhere. Not home — her home was a hotel room three weeks into a book tour. But somewhere. A kitchen table and food and people who called her family even when the circumstances of the calling were complicated.
She started walking.
She was halfway down Clement Street when she heard it.
Not close. From behind her — from the direction of the Forzone house. She stopped walking immediately.
She turned.
The street was empty. The streetlamp on the corner. The houses on either side with their lit windows and their ordinary Sunday evening interiors visible in fragments through gaps in curtains. The Forzone house at the far end — the front door closed, the lights on inside, the particular glow of a house that had people in it.
Nothing on the street. Nothing moving.
She stood very still and listened.
The night offered nothing back.
She turned around and kept walking. Faster than before. Her hands in her pockets and her eyes moving and her mind doing the thing it did in situations like this which was run through the available information and arrive at what it meant as efficiently as possible.
She was two blocks from the hotel when her phone rang.
Daphne's number.
She answered immediately. "Daphne—"
"She went out." Daphne's voice. Not panicked — controlled in the specific way of someone managing panic rather than not feeling it. "Hannah. She went out the back. I didn't know she'd— Tom's going after her. I don't know where she—"
"The back garden," Indigo said. "Does she have washing on the line."
A pause. Brief.
"I put washing out this afternoon," Daphne said. "I didn't bring it in. I meant to bring it in before dinner and I forgot."
"I'm coming back," Indigo said.
She was already moving.
The back garden of the Forzone house was accessed through a gate in the side fence. Indigo went through it without stopping and came around the side of the house into the garden and stopped.
Tom was there. Standing at the edge of the patio, facing the garden, his phone in his hand, his torch — a proper one, the kind kept in kitchen drawers for power cuts — pointed at the far end of the garden where the washing line ran between two posts.
Hannah was there too. Standing just inside the back door, which was open behind her, her arms crossed, looking at the garden.
Indigo looked at the garden.
The washing line. The clothes on it — shirts, a jacket, a pair of trousers, ordinary domestic laundry hanging still in the cold evening air.
And at the far end of the garden, at the back fence, the shadows were wrong.
Not dramatically. Just slightly. Just enough for someone who had learned to read shadows in a forest at seventeen to notice.
"Tom," Indigo said quietly. "Torch off."
Tom looked at her.
"Please," she said.
He clicked the torch off.
The garden went dark except for the light from the back door and the faint ambient glow of the neighbourhood beyond the fence. And in that reduced light the shape at the far end of the garden was clearer — not the fence, not the shadows of the washing, not anything that belonged in an ordinary back garden on a Sunday evening.
A figure. Standing at the back fence. Still. Completely, impossibly still.
Daphne appeared in the back doorway behind Hannah.
Nobody spoke.
The figure at the back fence didn't move.
Then, from the far end of the garden, from the dark beyond the washing line, came the sound.
Kuh.
Daphne made a sound behind them.
Kuh.
Tom moved. One step forward and Indigo put her hand on his arm.
"Don't," she said. Quietly. Firmly.
Kuh.
Then the scrape — different here, on the wood of the fence, a rougher sound, the blade catching on the grain.
Shhhk.
Then the last one.
Kuh.
The figure at the back fence stood in the dark and looked at the house and the people in the light of the back doorway and didn't move.
Indigo looked back at it.
She held Tom's arm and she looked at the shape in the dark at the back fence and she breathed and she did not look away.
The figure stood there for a long moment.
Then it turned.
Slowly. With the patience of something that was leaving because it chose to leave and not for any other reason.
It went over the fence.
One motion. Clean and effortless and completely silent. And then the back fence was just the back fence again and the garden was just the garden and the washing hung still on the line in the cold evening air.
Tom let out a breath.
Hannah was looking at the fence. At the place where the figure had been. With the inventory-taking eyes moving across it carefully, noting everything.
"He was looking at the washing," she said.
Everyone looked at her.
"The whole time," she said. "He wasn't looking at us. He was looking at the washing line."
Indigo looked at the washing line. At the clothes hanging on it. At the jacket — one of Daphne's, a dark one, hanging closest to where the figure had been standing.
She looked at the fence.
She looked at the washing line.
Something cold moved through her that wasn't fear. Something more specific than fear.
"Get inside," she said. "Everyone inside right now."
She called Officer Reeves from the Forzone kitchen.
While she talked she watched Daphne at the table — sitting down now, both hands around a cup of tea she wasn't drinking, looking at the surface of the table. Tom standing at the window with his arms crossed, looking at the back garden through the glass, the particular stillness of someone who had understood something they didn't want to have understood. Hannah at the kitchen counter, still watching, still cataloguing, still doing the thing she did.
Officer Reeves said he'd send someone.
She hung up.
She stood in the middle of the Forzone kitchen and looked at the washing line through the window and thought about Jacob Cain standing at the back fence looking at the clothes hanging on it.
She thought about what he'd been looking at specifically.
She thought about Daphne's jacket. Dark, practical, the right kind of weight for October.
She thought about the axe.
She thought about seven years of waiting and planning and the particular patience of someone who had decided that the outcome was already settled and was just filling in the details.
She thought about what he'd taken from the outdoor theatre. What Officer Reeves had told her that morning. The gun. The fireworks.
She thought about what he might want from a washing line.
"Indigo," Hannah said.
She looked up.
Hannah was watching her with the inventory-taking eyes.
"You know what he was looking at," Hannah said. Not a question.
Indigo looked at her. At the sixteen year old who had started the week with a boyfriend and a fundraiser and a drama department that needed lighting equipment and had ended it with none of those things and a question she deserved an honest answer to.
"He needed something to wear," Indigo said. "He's been visible. Too visible. After the theatre and the gym he needs to be able to move through the town without being recognised."
The kitchen absorbed that.
"He's going to dress like a normal person," Hannah said.
"For a while," Indigo said. "Until he doesn't need to anymore."
Tom turned from the window. He looked at Indigo with the kind face she'd noticed at the police station and the particular quality it had taken on in the last ten minutes which was the kind face doing something harder than being kind.
"How long," he said. "How long until he doesn't need to anymore."
Indigo looked at him. She thought about honesty and what it cost and what the alternative cost.
"Until he's ready to finish it," she said.
The kitchen was very quiet.
Outside the Sunday evening Clement Street continued doing what Sunday evening Clement Street did. The ordinary sounds of Millhaven at nine o'clock. Cars. Someone's television. A dog somewhere.
The washing line hung still in the back garden with the jacket on it and the other clothes and the two posts and the ordinary suburban geometry of it all.
Indigo looked at it through the window.
She thought about what came next.
She thought about it for a long time.
She didn't go back to the hotel that night.
Tom suggested it and Daphne agreed without being asked and Hannah said nothing but moved slightly to one side in the way of someone making room. Indigo said okay and meant it and went upstairs to the room that turned out to be a spare room with a bed that had clearly been made up sometime in the last year on the assumption that someone might eventually use it.
She lay in the spare room bed in the Forzone house on Clement Street in Millhaven and looked at the ceiling and listened to the house settle around her.
She could hear Tom and Daphne through the wall — not the words, just the particular rhythm of a conversation that was being kept quiet deliberately. The sounds of people navigating something together that they hadn't been given a choice about navigating.
She heard Hannah's door close down the hall.
She lay there and breathed and thought about the washing line and the figure at the back fence and the specific quality of the stillness of Jacob Cain standing in a back garden looking at ordinary domestic laundry.
She thought about what he was becoming. What seven years and a bullet and a burning forest and the deaths of both his children had made of him. She'd thought about this in the hotel room, in the police station, on the walk to Clement Street. She'd been thinking about it since she'd seen the envelope on the bookstore window.
He was different. She'd known that from the Kuh Kuh Kuh Shhk Kuh — the development of it, the deliberateness of it, the way it announced him now rather than the pure silence that had been his presence in Vicrock and New York. Something had shifted. Not in his patience — that was still there, still absolute, still the most frightening thing about him. But in his relationship to being seen.
In Vicrock he'd operated in darkness and secrecy. In New York he'd come into the light when he needed to — the corner store, the office building — but briefly, purposefully, in and out.
Here he was standing at the back fence of a family's garden letting them see him.
Standing at the edge of a crowd at an outdoor cinema.
Walking through a school building in the middle of a fundraiser.
Letting the sound precede him.
Letting himself be known.
She thought about what that meant.
She thought about it for a long time and the conclusion she arrived at was cold and simple and sat in her chest with the particular weight of something true.
He wanted her to know he was here. He'd wanted that since the envelope on the bookstore window. Not to frighten her into running — he'd had seven years to understand that she didn't run. Not to demonstrate capability — she already knew his capability better than anyone alive.
He wanted her to know because knowing and being unable to stop it was worse than not knowing. Because watching him move through this town, through these people, toward whatever he was building toward, knowing and being unable to prevent it — that was the thing. That was the specific instrument he'd chosen for her.
Not the axe. Not yet.
Just the knowing.
She breathed.
In. Out.
She stared at the ceiling of the spare room in the Forzone house and felt the cold weight of it and breathed through it and on the other side of the breathing she arrived at the same place she always arrived at.
Not ready. She was never ready.
Going anyway. She always went anyway.
She closed her eyes.
She slept.
At two fourteen in the morning Daphne Forzone went downstairs for a glass of water.
She did this sometimes when she couldn't sleep — the particular thirst of someone who had been lying awake for a couple of hours and whose body had decided that water was the thing it wanted. She did it quietly, the way she did most things at two in the morning, in the particular careful way of someone navigating a house in the dark without wanting to wake anyone.
She filled a glass at the kitchen sink.
She stood at the sink and drank it and looked out the window at the back garden.
The washing line. The clothes on it. The jacket. The two posts. The ordinary suburban geometry of it in the dark, lit faintly by the ambient glow of the neighbourhood.
She stood there and looked at it and thought about Tom upstairs probably not asleep either, lying in the dark doing the same calculations she was doing. About Hannah in her room probably not asleep either, doing the inventory thing with whatever information she had available.
She thought about Indigo in the spare room. Probably not asleep either.
She put the glass down.
She looked at the back garden.
She thought about the figure at the fence. The stillness of it. The way Indigo had said don't when Tom had moved forward and the particular authority of that don't — not aggressive, not alarmed, just the flat accurate don't of someone who knew exactly what moving forward would cost.
She thought about what Indigo had said in the kitchen.
Until he's ready to finish it.
She looked at the washing line.
She looked at the jacket on it.
She thought about going out and bringing the washing in. The sensible domestic practical thing. The thing she'd meant to do before dinner and forgotten. The ordinary resolution of an ordinary task left unfinished.
She stood at the kitchen window and looked at the garden and thought about it for a long moment.
Then she decided she'd do it in the morning. In the daylight. When she could see the whole garden properly.
She picked up the glass and filled it again.
She went back upstairs.
At five forty seven in the morning Daphne Forzone went out to get the washing in.
She did this in her dressing gown with a cup of coffee already made in the kitchen because the morning was cold and she'd decided that the washing had been out long enough and that doing it first thing meant it was done.
She went through the back door into the garden.
The morning was the particular grey of very early on a Monday — not dark, not light, just the specific colourlessness of the hour before the sun had committed to arriving. Cold and still and quiet, the neighbourhood not yet started, just the birds doing what birds did at this hour which was assume they were the only things awake and act accordingly.
She crossed the patio. She walked across the wet grass toward the washing line.
She was reaching for the first item — a shirt, one of Tom's — when something in the quality of the garden changed.
She didn't hear anything. No sound preceded it. No Kuh Kuh no warning no announcement.
Just a change in the quality of the air. The particular change of a space that has another presence in it that wasn't there before.
She turned.
He was standing at the back fence.
Not where he'd been last night — not outside the fence, on the other side of it. Inside. In the garden. Standing between the fence and the washing line with the dark jacket and the burlap mask and the axe in his right hand and the two dark eye gaps pointed at her.
Daphne looked at him.
He looked back.
She thought about the back door. Open behind her. The kitchen. Tom upstairs. Indigo upstairs. The glass of the kitchen window and what was visible through it.
She thought about screaming.
She screamed.
The sound went through the Forzone house the way sound went through houses at six in the morning — total and immediate, every room receiving it at once, every sleeping person in it going from asleep to not asleep in a single instant.
Indigo was off the bed and through the spare room door and down the stairs before she'd fully processed what the sound was. Her feet on the stairs and the kitchen doorway and through it and the back door already open and the garden—
Daphne.
On the ground between the patio and the washing line. Not still — moving, trying to get up, one hand pressed to her side. The dark spreading through the fabric of her dressing gown. The hiss of breath through her teeth that meant pain being managed rather than surrendered to.
The Woodsman standing over her.
He looked up when Indigo came through the back door.
She looked back at him.
He had the axe in one hand. In the other — something she recognised. The harpoon gun. The one she hadn't known about until Officer Reeves had mentioned it this morning in a list of items that had gone missing from various locations around Millhaven in the last forty eight hours.
He'd been collecting. The way he always collected. Building toward something.
"Tom," Indigo said. Behind her. Loud enough for the house to hear. "Call Officer Reeves. Right now."
She didn't look away from the figure.
"Get away from her," she said. To the figure. To Jacob Cain behind the burlap mask. To the thing that had killed her friends and her boyfriend and her boyfriend's children and a corner store worker named Ben Kowalski and a boy named Matthew Grader and a man named Scott Michal and a woman in a forest and was now standing in a back garden in Clement Street in Millhaven at six in the morning having stabbed her aunt in her dressing gown.
The figure looked at her.
It didn't move away from Daphne.
It raised the harpoon gun.
"Indigo." Hannah's voice. From the back doorway behind her. Controlled. Inventory-taking.
"Get inside Hannah."
"Indigo—"
"Inside. Now."
She heard Hannah move. Heard the back door and then the kitchen and then — bless her, bless the inventory-taking eyes and the particular intelligence behind them — the sound of Hannah's voice on the phone giving an address in the flat accurate way of someone who had understood what was needed.
Daphne was looking up at her from the grass. Still conscious. Still pressing her hand to her side. Still breathing.
"Stay still," Indigo said to her. "Don't move."
She looked at the figure.
The harpoon gun was pointed at her. Not at Daphne. At her.
"Okay," she said. Not to Daphne. To the figure. "Okay. This is between us. It's always been between us."
The figure looked at her.
She looked back.
The garden was very still. The birds had stopped. The morning was the particular held-breath quiet of the moment before something.
She breathed.
In.
Out.
The harpoon gun fired.
She threw herself sideways.
The harpoon went through her left arm — the outside of it, the muscle below the shoulder, missing the bone, a clean through and through that she registered as impact and heat before she registered as pain. She hit the wet grass and rolled and came up on her feet and the arm was wrong but working and she was between the figure and the back door and Daphne was to her left and the washing line was between her and the figure.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
The harpoon gun was in his hand — single shot, she'd registered that, she didn't know if he had another one or if that was it.
The axe was in his other hand.
She was between him and the house.
He took one step toward her.
Kuh.
The sound of the axe head on the wet patio stone as he dragged it.
Kuh.
She didn't move.
He took another step.
Kuh.
Somewhere inside the house Tom Forzone's voice, on the phone, urgent, giving an address.
Somewhere in the distance a siren beginning.
The figure took another step.
Indigo Derby stood in the back garden of her aunt's house in Millhaven at six in the morning with a harpoon through her arm and the axe coming toward her and she looked at Jacob Cain behind the burlap mask and she did not move.
Kuh. Kuh. Kuh. Shhk. Kuh.
Then the siren got louder.
The figure stopped.
He looked at her. The two dark eye gaps. The particular quality of that look which she knew better than almost anything — the assessment of a professional, the calculation of someone who had been doing this long enough to understand when to proceed and when to withdraw.
He turned.
He went back over the fence the way he'd come. One motion, clean and effortless. And then the fence was just the fence and the garden was just the garden and Daphne was on the grass and Indigo was standing between the washing line and the back door and the siren was getting louder and the morning was the particular grey of six am in late October and her arm hurt very much.
She crossed to Daphne.
She crouched down beside her.
"Still with me," she said.
"Still with you," Daphne said. Her voice was rough but steady. The hand still pressed to her side.
"You're going to be okay," Indigo said. She said it with the flat accuracy she tried to bring to everything — not as comfort, not as reassurance, but as information. As something she believed.
Daphne looked at her. At the arm. At the harpoon.
"You've got a—" she started.
"I know," Indigo said. "I've had worse."
That wasn't entirely true. But it was true enough for six in the morning in a back garden in Clement Street.
The siren was very close now.
Hannah appeared in the back doorway. She looked at Daphne on the grass. She looked at Indigo's arm. She looked at the back fence.
The inventory-taking eyes moved across all of it quickly and thoroughly.
Then she crossed the garden to her mother and crouched down on the other side of her and put her hand over Daphne's hand where it pressed against her side.
"The ambulance is coming," she said. To her mother. Steady and clear and accurate.
Daphne looked at her daughter.
"I know," she said. "I know it is."
The siren arrived.
The morning arrived with it — the particular irreversible arrival of a day that had started the way this one had started and was going to have to be gotten through regardless.
Indigo sat back on the wet grass with her arm doing what it was doing and watched the morning arrive and breathed.
In. Out.
Whatever came next was coming.
She was going to meet it.