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In April the light came back to Hollin Bridge before the bread was finished. Ana noticed it one morning at half past five, standing at the old table with her hands in the last dough of the night: a greyness in the kitchen window that had not been there the week before, and then, behind the stone bridge, a thin line of something that was almost gold. For five months she had baked entirely in the dark. Now the dark was getting shorter at both ends, and the river behind the bakery had begun, very early in the morning, to sound like spring.

Acasă

She had been in Hollin Bridge for seven months. She had arrived on the last bus in the rain with one bag and an advert on her phone, and a vocabulary, she calculated afterwards, of perhaps eight hundred words, most of them nouns. She still kept the list on her phone of the new words she learned, the habit of her first night, though it was a long list now and she rarely added to it. The last word on it, from February, was solicitor. The one before that was rehabilitation. The first, she had scrolled back once to check, was flour.

În aprilie, lumina se întorcea la Hollin Bridge înainte ca pâinea să fie gata. Ana a observat asta într-o dimineață, la cinci și jumătate, stând la masa veche cu mâinile în ultima bucată de aluat a nopții: o nuanță cenușie în fereastra bucătăriei, care nu fusese acolo cu o săptămână înainte, și apoi, în spatele podului de piatră, o dungă subțire din ceva ce părea aproape aur curat. Timp de cinci luni coptese exclusiv pe întuneric. Acum întunericul se scurta la ambele capete, iar râul din spatele brutăriei începuse, la ore foarte timpurii ale dimineții, să sune a primăvară.

The bakery belonged to the town now. It said so on a small brass plate beside the green door, which Priya had commissioned and polished every morning with the end of her cardigan: Bell’s Bakery, owned by the people of Hollin Bridge, 161 of them and counting. The counting was Priya’s idea. It was up to a hundred and ninety-four. People still came in to buy a single share the way other people bought a lottery ticket, and Priya entered each one in her notebook with the same tremendous ceremony, whether it was Helen Fenwick’s solicitor or Grace Osei’s friend from school with fifty pence.

Era la Hollin Bridge de șapte luni. Sosise cu ultimul autobuz, pe ploaie, cu o singură geantă și cu un anunț pe telefon, având un vocabular, așa cum a calculat după aceea, de vreo opt sute de cuvinte, majoritatea substantive. Încă păstra pe telefon lista noilor cuvinte pe care le învăța — un obicei din prima ei noapte —, deși era o listă lungă acum și rareori mai adăuga ceva la ea. Ultimul cuvânt de pe listă, din februarie, era solicitor. Cel dinaintea lui fusese rehabilitation. Primul, așa cum verificase dând o dată înapoi până la capăt, fusese flour.