Second Bloom
July is the summer of the forty-fifth year, and Valentina is in it the way she has been in every July of the second life: fully, without the distracted quality that marked the first life's summers, which blurred into each other because she had never quite been present in any of them.
Clara is ten, going to eleven, which she considers a more precise description than 'almost eleven' — she has a mathematician's relationship with her own age that Ethan attributes to the geology phase and Valentina attributes to character. She spends July between the Gràcia apartment, the Sant Andreu kitchen with Rosa, the Priorat with Montse, and a coastal path she has appointed her own geological survey area, w
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