The mug is still warm. She set it on the sill before she left, and it is still there, still warm, the ceramic holding heat the way a small thing sometimes holds more than it should. Outside the window the valley goes down and down and then keeps going, forest dissolving into distance at a scale she has not named and does not need to — the ridge opposite is twenty miles away and means nothing except that it is there, that the air between here and there is real air a person could walk through given enough time and enough willingness to be small.

She is small here. Smaller than she has been in months. Not diminished — held. The difference matters. Being held by something this large is not being crushed by it; it is being the mug on the sill, warm, placed carefully, the warmth itself a kind of argument that something particular happened here, that someone was recently this exact person in this exact light.

The valley does not resolve. It goes on through the glass and she goes on watching it go, the mug cooling by degrees she is not tracking, the light not landing anywhere yet, the whole enormous thing still —