He had said six in the morning, and at five forty-five I was already dressed.
This was not unusual for me. The capacity for early waking had been trained into me over years of work that required you to be functional at whatever hour the work demanded, and it had long since ceased to be an effort and become simply the default state of my body — a clock wound to precision, regardless of what the day required of it. I was dressed and at the small window of the guesthouse room watching the harbor before the harbor itself had fully committed to being visible.
The sea was dark in the way it was only at that hour — not the darkness of night, which was absolute and indifferent, but the particular blue-dark of early morning, the color of a world in the process of remembering itself. The sky above the water held the first suggestion of light at the eastern edge, a strip of pale gray that had not yet decided to become anything else.
