Sublime

She’d read in a park near the school, storing novels in the hollow of an ancient oak she thought of as her friend.

She can remember when she first came to the orphanage (in a spotty way—she remembers the orphanage seeming new and strange but can’t recall what life had been like before, or where, or with whom) that the land was even wilder back then, the stately plantation house seeming to rise from the dirt as if Miss Murray and the Miss Shotwells had grown it