Chapter 20: What Edmund Was, Before

The clock on the mantelpiece reads 6:21.

Edmund knows this without looking. He has always known it without looking. The clock exists in the same way the floorboards exist, the way the particular quality of afternoon light through the south-facing window exists — as furniture of the interval, the known geometry of waiting. Two minutes to the moment. Then the loop completes and begins again, the vinyl clicking back to the needle's beginning, the groove wearing imperceptibly deeper with each pass.

Except.