The cold did not break overnight. It never does.
It happened in pieces, the way most things do—a slightly less brutal morning, a patch of ice that softened to mud by noon, a week of gray skies that suddenly, on one unremarkable Thursday, gave way to pale and distant sun. I noticed it when I walked through the garden and saw a single weed had pressed through a crack in the stone path. Green and stubborn and completely unbothered by the season that had tried to bury everything.
I stood there and looked at it for a long time.
