Forgiveness: An Excerpt

Now Katherine stands at the window of the bedroom she and her twin once shared, watching a gull on the sill. It’s as if the bird has gotten lost all these miles from the ocean, all this distance from the color blue. Philadelphia is a steam swell, an ash pit, a scorcher. It is no place for a gull, not this September. But there the gull is, clinging to the sill beyond the window of Katherine’s room, casting a shadow on the pillow where Anna once burrowed her head. Katherine won’t turn to see what is inevitably there—absence and shadow, condemnation.

— Forgiveness, a novel-in-progress