I’m sorry for everything.” Then he turns and pushes back into the woods, and he’s gone.

I am growing stronger. I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire.

The sparrows jumped before they knew how to fly, and they learned to fly only because they had jumped.

I’m Hana,” Hana says. “And this is Lena.” She jabs me with an elbow. I know I must look like a fish, standing there with my mouth gaping open, but I’m too outraged to speak. He’s lying. I know he’s the one I saw yesterday, would bet my life on it. “Alex. Nice to meet you.” Alex keeps his eyes on me as he and Hana shake hands. Then he extends a hand to me. “Lena,” he says thoughtfully. “I’ve never heard that name before.

It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.

It's the way he says my name: like music.

The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other...they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down.