The dike railing is cold and trustworthy. You keep it under your gloves like a promise.

Chopped water makes the marsh lights crazy: coins shatter, rejoin, lie, tell the truth, lie again. You do not follow them. You watch them fail to be doors. Thunder follows lightning at a count you can do without showing off. Sound is slower than light. The gap is a ruler. The marsh is alive—as an ecosystem, peat and birds and gas and kids with notebooks, not as a mouth.

If Jonah is beside you, he wants to lean, and you keep him on the safe side of the rail with a look you borrowed from Aunt Mara. Rain needles sideways. Somewhere a fox screams, or the wind does, and you do not invent a woman. Somewhere a pale coin drifts, and you do not invent a kidnapper.

Headlamps bloom on the town road: Aunt Mara, sandbag-slow, coming home to a keeper’s night.

You can stay low, meet those lamps, and give a true report from what you have.

You can name the almost-ghosts out loud as they happen—the lights in front of you, the thunder, whatever you already learned a true name for—because speaking the real cause is a kind of bravery that still likes stories.