The Small Remembering

# Chapter One: A Morning in October

The fog horn found her before the alarm did.

It came through the bedroom wall the way it always did on October mornings — low, steady, patient as a held breath — and Iris let it pull her out of sleep the way a tide pulls a stone loose from sand. Not roughly. Just inevitably. She'd left the window cracked two inches overnight because the rain had been gentle when she went to bed, and now she could hear it had turned serious. Fat drops against the glass, a gutter somewhere singing its one note.

She lay still for thirty seconds, counting. This was a habit she'd picked up from a book on mindfulness that she'd checked out of her own library and never quite returned. Thirty seconds of listening before her feet touched the cold floor. The fog horn again. The rain. A car somewhere on Harbour Street, tires hissing on wet asphalt. Tuesday.

The floor was cold. She'd been meaning to buy a rug for the bedroom since August, but August had become September and September had slid into October the way it did in Alder Bay — softly, without announcement, the light simply changing its mind about how long it wanted to stay.

Her cottage was small enough that the kitchen was six steps from the bed. She filled the kettle from the tap and set it on the burner and stood there in her socks and the oversized flannel she slept in, waiting for the water to boil. The chipped brown mug was already on the counter where she'd left it last night, rinsed and turned upside down on the dish towel. Her grandmother had given her this mug when Iris was eleven, and it had survived two apartments, one cross-country move, and a dropped box on the front steps of this very cottage three years ago. The chip was on the rim, a small half-moon absence that her lip had learned to avoid.