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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.

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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.

4월이 되자 Hollin Bridge에는 빵이 다 구워지기도 전에 아침빛이 돌아왔다. 아나는 어느 날 아침 5시 반에, 낡은 식탁에 서서 그날 밤의 마지막 반죽에 손을 얹은 채 그 빛을 알아챘다. 전주까지만 해도 없었던 부엌 창문의 잿빛, 그리고 돌다리 뒤편으로 거의 금빛에 가까운 무언가가 얇은 선처럼 드리워져 있었다. 지난 5개월 동안 그녀는 줄곧 캄캄한 어둠 속에서 빵을 구워 왔다. 이제 어둠은 앞뒤로 조금씩 짧아지고 있었고, 빵집 뒤편의 강물은 이른 아침마다 봄을 닮은 소리를 내기 시작했다.

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.

Hollin Bridge에 온 지도 일곱 달이 흘렀다. 그녀는 비 내리는 날 막차를 타고 가방 하나와 휴대전화 속의 광고, 그리고 나중에 셈해 보니 아마 8백 단어 남짓—대부분 명사였다—에 불과했던 어휘력을 지닌 채 도착했었다. 첫날밤의 습관대로, 그녀는 여전히 새로 배운 낱말 목록을 휴대전화에 보관하고 있었지만, 이제는 제법 긴 목록이 되어 새로 덧붙이는 일도 드물었다. 2월에 적힌 마지막 단어는 'solicitor'였다. 그 앞의 단어는 'rehabilitation'이었다. 언젠가 위로 올려 확인해 보았을 때 가장 첫 단어는 'flour'였다.