Before the River Commits

Jane Lahey has worked palliative wards for the better part of two decades and knows the full range of a sleeping person's communications. She has watched her granddaughter sleep in many rooms over many years. She knows this face. What she does not know quite yet is what to do with what is presently surfacing across the room — a set of small sounds her trained ear can diagnose in half a breath, and which she has decided, for the moment, to let finish in the granddaughter's own time.

Across the room, Detective Sarah Lahey is curled into her grandfather's old recliner by the window, still caught inside the shape of a dream she had no intention of narrating to anyone. The night outside has begun to commit to morning. The Derwent is turning from silver to gold in that particular way it turns when nobody is watching it except one very old woman in a very large four-poster bed.

What passes between them in the hour before Sarah has to reassemble the detective and leave for work is the kind of morning two women share when both of them know the thing neither of them is ready to name. It is the last flickering light of a once-vibrant constellation still finding small reasons to hold onto each other — and the gentle art of letting a morning be as ordinary as both of them can still manage.