Chapter 24: The Dissolution of the Covenant and What It Costs

The morning after she made the decision, Maren woke before the alarm and lay in the grey-wool dark of her room listening to the town settle. A door closed somewhere in the house. Water moved through old pipes. From the direction of the harbour, two jackdaws were having an argument about something with the focused energy of beings who have opinions and the vocal apparatus to defend them.

She had slept. This was notable enough to notice.

She dressed without turning on the light, moving by the knowledge of the room she had accumulated in five weeks of living inside it — the bed's position, the chair's, the radiator that clicked twice before warming and then became something she no longer heard. She pulled on the jumper that had been her mother's and had lost the specific smell of her mother now, which was a different grief than the initial grief, smaller and somehow sharper, a grief about the nature of grief rather than the thing itself.