There was a private mythology to her: rituals invented to honor small pleasures. She judged days by the quality of light in a cafe; she considered thrift-store finds sacred; she kept a jar of ocean-smoothed coins in her kitchen as a repository for chance. She believed in second chances for novels and for people. She delighted in the improbable alignment of moments — the perfect wrong song at the perfect wrong time — and treated those alignments like proof of some capricious benevolence.