It's ten to five on a Thursday, and the class has spent the week on interest rates. The textbook had a diagram with arrows: rates go up, borrowing goes down, spending slows. If you ask the students on Monday what happens when a central bank raises rates, most of them will describe the arrows. None of them will describe a person.

In Salt Harbour, a fisher named Mira opens a letter about her boat loan. Last month the payment was 412. This month it's 577. Her grandmother reads it over her shoulder and says, "You have fourteen days." The rest of the story follows Mira as she works out where that number came from, starting at her kitchen table and ending in a room where someone she's never met made a decision.

You can't follow Mira without learning how a rate decision reaches a household. We built it that way on purpose. The lesson is the plot.

Across town, a student sits down in a counsellor's office and says she's fine. Her partner lives eight hours ahead. They have a schedule: video calls on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a phone call on Saturdays, texts on Sundays. Nothing is wrong, exactly. She just can't stop doing the maths on what time it is there.

In The Keeper of Hours, Maren waters the basil every day until it dies. She loved it too carefully. Nobody in the story names what she's feeling, and nobody needs to. Sometimes people can recognise their own lives in someone else's before they're ready to talk about them. A story gives them somewhere to stand while they get there.

HOUSEHOLD INVENTORY, CONDUCTED ON THE OCCASION OF THE DEFROST

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