I woke up before the alarm I hadn't set.

My body knew. It always knows the mornings that matter, the ones where something is ending or beginning or both at once, where the ordinary texture of a day has been replaced by something that requires you to be fully awake before it arrives. I lay still for a few minutes and looked at the ceiling I'd been looking at for five years. The faint water stain in the far corner we'd meant to fix in year two. The way morning light fell across it in the first hour, pale and tentative. I'd memorized that ceiling without ever deciding to, the...