The train ride took two hours.
Satsuki had made it dozens of times over the years — enough that the stations had become a kind of autobiography, the landmarks changing at different rates, some things exactly as they had always been and some things so altered she had to look twice to confirm she recognized them at all.
She had a window seat. She watched the city give way to the suburbs and the suburbs give way to the particular landscape of a smaller place — the pace of it different, the density different, the sky arriving more completely because there were fewer things interrupting it.
She had her notebook. She did not open it.
