“It was seven o’clock but still light, a drowsy early evening on a warm summer’s day, the sky starting to soften into the pink, purple, and gold folds of dusk, and the lower reaches of the garden just beginning to darken and cool. The colors and smells, the quality of the light, were visceral. Jess could feel them in the rhythm of her heartbeat, deep in her lungs, in the cells of her skin. She knew them as one can’t help but know the cadence of their mother tongue.”
