If he’d had any talent at drawing, he could have reproduced a picture of this from memory: Violet, unaware of her surroundings. Her lips were pursed; she focused on the paper in front of her with the singular intensity of a cat watching a butterfly. He’d seen her like this a thousand times—more than a thousand, actually. When Violet became engrossed in a project, she lost track of where she was and what she was doing. He’d often wondered if she found it disorienting to look up and discover half the day gone. One day, the house she was in would burn to the ground. When that happened, she would
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