Winter came to the city the way it always does: quietly, between one day and the next, the air suddenly cold and sharp where it had been merely cool, the sky acquiring that particular steel-gray quality that means the season has properly arrived.
I noticed it on the morning that I walked through the household garden and saw that the last of the late-blooming marigolds had finally given up. They had lasted longer than I expected, stubborn orange-gold against the encroaching cold. Now they were gone. The garden was all bare branches and frozen earth, the kind of austere beauty that winter always produces and that I had never managed to appreciate as much as I knew I was supposed to.
A month had passed since the Ministry letter.
