If it had been misery keeping her down, she’d have started a revolution. But it was loveliness that pinned her to the bed. It was not the misery of the world crushing her but the overwhelming beauty. She could not get up from under the weight of the hope and joy that flowed off people, even when everything—everything—was broken. She was undone by the shocking yellows and greens of the young lemon tree beyond the window of the bedroom, heavy with the last season’s fruit and the next season’s flowers; the thin lip of milky light where the ocean met the horizon on an otherwise black night on the
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