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The canal held its own weather.
Even under a clear late-morning sky, the air above the water stayed a degree cooler than the towpath, touched by damp stone and the slow, vegetal scent that rose from the banks. Plane trees lined both sides in a long procession, their trunks pale and flaking, their branches throwing a thin lace of shade across the channel. Some stood healthy and heavy-limbed. Others were marked with the ugly stains Elodie had learned to notice only after living on the water: patches of canker blackening bark, dead limbs cut back hard, an unease inside beauty.
Le Livre Vagabond moved west at the pace the canal permitted, the engine humming steadily beneath her feet.
Eight kilometres an hour had a way of disciplining the mind. Eight kilometres an hour. The speed limit on the Canal du Midi, and also, it turned out, the speed at which doubt could keep pace. One could not dash toward anything. One could not even really drift. The barge required a hand on the tiller, an eye on the bend ahead, a respect for other boats, trees, banks, bridges, depth, wind. It asked for attention, and kept asking.
In practice, it left too much room to think.
She stood at the stern in a navy sweater with the sleeves pushed up, one hand on the tiller, the other resting briefly on the rail when the channel widened. The light had the particular brightness of the south in autumn, clear without cruelty, gold caught under the white. Ahead, the canal stretched between its banks like a sentence still deciding how it would end.