The Long Encoding

# Chapter One: May Morning

The rain jacket stayed on the hook by the door.

Iris noticed this the way she noticed most important things — after she'd already passed through the moment and was two steps down the front walk, keys in hand, coffee thermos warm against her palm. She stopped. Looked back at the cottage. The jacket hung in the narrow window beside the door, visible through the glass, its dark green fabric creased from six months of daily use.

She didn't need it.

The thought arrived with a physical jolt, small but genuine, like the first sip of too-hot tea. May had come to Alder Bay overnight, it seemed. The sky wasn't blue — this was still the Olympic Peninsula, and Iris had learned not to expect anything so dramatic from the local weather — but it was a luminous, pearlescent grey that meant the sun was up there somewhere, trying. The air smelled different. Warmer. Green. The alders along Harbour Street had leafed out fully in the last week, their canopy closing overhead like hands folding together, and beneath them the light filtered down in soft yellow-green patches that moved when the breeze moved.

She left the jacket where it was.