The child nodded as if both answers were exactly what they'd been looking for.

Pandora came to the ceremony with a jar of preserved dawn. She handed it to Melanie and said, simply, "So you know the geography."

It wasn't literal—no saltwater sloshed when she walked—but something about the way she moved made people feel tides. She arrived in town the summer Melanie turned twenty-eight and decided, with the blunt certainty of someone mid-reckoning, to quit the job that had hollowed her mornings and to learn how to make things that mattered.