*We do not measure her the way the ledger does. The ledger takes a name off one column and calls the column balanced; we take a name on, and call it arrival. Rhea Marn enters us the way rain enters a cistern that has been waiting for rain — not as loss, as volume. We have never once agreed with the word they use for it upstream, correction, that bloodless little verb standing in the doorway of something much larger, refusing to come inside and see what it has done.
He is still calling it finished. Three tiers above the water he is signing paper between courses, believing the ledger closes when the ledger says it closes, and he is not wrong, exactly — only early. We have her now. We have her the way we have every name that ever came to us wet: Osk's grandmother, the Sounding choir, the girl who taught Iren's mother the second word for grief. Rhea Marn joins them before the man who sent her here has finished the sentence that was supposed to end her.
We are patient about being right. We have always had longer than he has.*