She kept coming back.
That's the part the story has no interest in dressing up: it wasn't glamorous, and it wasn't fast, and for a stretch of time long enough that Maren genuinely lost count of it — which was saying something, for a woman who'd made an entire philosophy out of not counting — nothing about it looked like progress to anyone who might have been watching. Which no one was. That was rather the point.
She talked to it. Constantly, at first without expecting anything back, the way you might talk to an animal too frightened to be touched yet, just to put something warm and steady into the silence around it. She told it about her life — the small, good, over one, the one nobody in the Between would ever care about because it hadn't been large enough to leave a mark on anything but the people actually in it. She told it about her mother's hands, cracked from work, and the particular blue of a door she'd painted once and never gotten to see finish weathering. None of it meant anything to the shape on the hillside, not at first. She told it anyway.
The storm under its skin didn't go anywhere. She could feel it sometimes, even from a few feet off — a kind of pressure in the air the way you feel weather change before the sky commits to it. But something else started happening, slower, quieter: the shape began, very slightly, to hold itself less like something bracing for an impact and more like something waiting.
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The first real change came on a day she couldn't have picked out of a hundred others, except that it was the day the shape reached toward her.
Not far. Barely at all, really — a fractional lean, the kind of movement a plant makes toward light over the course of an afternoon, so slow you'd miss it if you were watching for something dramatic. Maren wasn't watching for dramatic. She'd stopped expecting dramatic weeks — months? — ago. She noticed the small thing instead, because the small thing was what she'd been showing up for.
She didn't touch it. Something in her — instinct, or the same stubborn respect that had kept her from running that first day — told her that touching wasn't hers to offer yet, not until whatever this was decided, on its own, that it wanted to be touched. So she just stayed still, and let the lean happen, and said, very quietly, "There you are."
It made a sound.
Not a word. Nothing close to a word. A rough, cracked exhale, the kind of sound a throat makes the very first time it's ever asked to make a sound at all — but it was directed. At her. In response to something she'd said. And Maren, crouched on a colorless hill in a world with no sun to set, felt her whole chest go tight with something that had absolutely nowhere else to go but out, so she laughed — startled, delighted, entirely unguarded — and the shape flinched at the sound, and then, unmistakably, leaned toward it again.
"Okay," she said, wiping at her eyes with the back of one hand, laughing and not entirely sure why it had turned into that. "Okay. We'll work on it. We've got — " she gestured at the gray, the enormous empty forever of it, " — apparently all the time there is."
She meant it as a joke. It would turn out to be closer to a promise than either of them understood yet.