October came in through the kitchen window first — the particular change in the morning air that arrived before the leaves confirmed it, something drier and more deliberate than September, the year beginning its long negotiation with the cold.
Saki noted the month change in her planner and updated the countdown without ceremony.
Eleven months to late September had become ten months and three weeks, and would keep becoming smaller numbers, and the household would keep being the household inside the shrinking space between now and then — meals and arguments and ordinary evenings and the specific texture of nine people who had moved through something difficult and arrived somewhere warm, living forward into it day by day.
The vows were being written.
