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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.

四月里，天光在面包烤好前回到了霍林布里奇。安娜是在清晨五点半注意到的，当时她正站在那张旧桌子旁，双手揉着当夜最后一团面：厨房窗户上透出一片前一周还不曾有过的灰白，紧接着，石桥后面浮现出一道近乎金色的细线。五个月来，她做工烘焙时四周始终是一片漆黑。如今，黑夜在两头都渐渐变短，面包店后面的河流也在清晨极早的时候，开始有了春天的声音。

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.

她来霍林布里奇已有七个月了。当初她在雨中搭乘最后一班公交车到达这里，只带了一只包，手机里存着一则广告；她事后算过，自己当时的词汇量大概也就八百个单词，而且大部分还是名词。她手机里依然保留着那个记录所学新单词的列表，那是她第一个夜晚养成的习惯，尽管列表如今已经很长，而她也极少再往里添加了。上面二月份记下的最后一个词是“solicitor”（律师）。在此前的一个词是“rehabilitation”（康复）。至于第一个词，她有一次曾往前翻看核对过，是“flour”（面粉）。