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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.

Casa

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.

In aprile la luce tornò a Hollin Bridge prima che il pane fosse pronto. Ana se ne accorse una mattina alle cinque e mezza, ritta davanti al vecchio tavolo con le mani nell'ultimo impasto della notte: un chiarore grigio nella finestra della cucina che la settimana prima non c'era, e poi, dietro il ponte di pietra, una sottile linea di qualcosa che era quasi oro. Per cinque mesi aveva infornato interamente al buio. Ora l'oscurità si stava accorciando a entrambi i capi, e il fiume dietro la panetteria aveva iniziato, di primissima mattina, ad avere il suono della primavera.

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.

Si trovava a Hollin Bridge da sette mesi. Era arrivata con l'ultimo autobus sotto la pioggia, con una borsa e un annuncio sul telefono, e un vocabolario, calcolò in seguito, di forse ottocento parole, la maggior parte delle quali sostantivi. Conservava ancora sul telefono l'elenco delle parole nuove che imparava, l'abitudine della sua prima notte, sebbene ora fosse una lunga lista e vi aggiungesse qualcosa di rado. L'ultima parola, risalente a febbraio, era solicitor. Quella precedente era rehabilitation. La prima, come aveva verificato una volta scorrendo all'indietro, era flour.