They told Ines it would take a year to feel like herself again, and she had been in the Grief Country for six months when she understood that this was not how it worked.
The Grief Country did not operate on a timeline. It operated on terrain.
She had not known it was a country until her sister told her. Her sister had been there herself, years ago, after their mother died, and she had not known what to call it then either, but she recognized the landmarks now: the specific quality of the light, which was accurate without being dim; the way time moved differently, not slower exactly but more visible, as if you could see each hour as a separate object; the way other people appeared from a distance that was not physical.
The rivers, her sister told her, ran north. This was one of the things the residents knew that no one outside could explain. You could tell how long someone had been there by where they were relative to the rivers: close to them meant recent; far from them meant time had passed. She did not understand yet what the rivers were made of. She was still close to them. She woke at three in the morning most nights with the sound of them in her ears.
Her son had been twenty-six. He had been a carpenter. He had learned to make chairs and had given her one, the first one he'd made that held weight reliably, and it stood in her kitchen and she could not sit in it.
She ate her meals standing. She understood this was a thing people noticed and she did not know how to explain it.
The language of the Grief Country was one she was learning without wanting to. She had already acquired the specific fluency in silence, the way of occupying a room without filling it, the particular knowledge of what it costs to be asked how you are and to tell the truth about it. She had learned the gesture her body made now when she passed his name in her own thoughts: a kind of internal flinch that was not pain so much as recognition.
She did not know how long she would be here. Her sister said: there is no fixed term. There is only the learning.
She looked out the window at the light, which was accurate without being kind.