Chapter 25: What Ashveil Keeps and What It Returns

The birds came back on a Thursday.

Not all of them at once — Ashveil was not the kind of place that returned things dramatically — but the herring gulls first, riding the updraft off the harbour wall in the pale early light, and then the jackdaws in their opinionated pairs, and by the following Monday the oystercatchers were back on the tideline, picking their way through the wrack with the focused proprietary air of commuters resuming a route that had been, briefly, under maintenance.

Maren noted all of this. She had not stopped noting things. She suspected she never would.