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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.

Ev

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.

Nisan ayında Hollin Bridge’e aydınlık ekmekler henüz bitmeden geri geldi. Ana bunu bir sabah saat beşi buçuk geçe, elleri gecenin son hamurunda, eski masanın başında dururken fark etti: Mutfak penceresinde bir önceki hafta orada olmayan bir grilik ve ardından taş köprünün arkasında neredeyse altın sarısı ince bir çizgi belirdi. Beş aydır tamamen karanlıkta pişirmişti ekmeklerini. Şimdiyse karanlık her iki ucundan da kısalıyordu ve fırının arkasındaki nehir, sabahın çok erken saatlerinde bahar gibi çağıldamaya başlamıştı.

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.

Yedi aydır Hollin Bridge’deydi. Yağmur altında son otobüsle, tek bir çanta, telefonunda bir ilan ve sonradan hesapladığı kadarıyla çoğu isimlerden oluşan belki sekiz yüz kelimelik bir dağarcıkla gelmişti. İlk gecesinden kalma bir alışkanlıkla öğrendiği yeni kelimelerin listesini hâlâ telefonunda tutuyordu; gerçi artık uzun bir listeydi ve nadiren yenilerini ekliyordu. Şubattan kalma son kelime solicitor idi. Ondan önceki ise rehabilitation idi. İlk kelime ise, bir keresinde geriye kaydırıp baktığı üzere, flour idi.