That night, Eloise lay in bed with the window open. The air smelled like cut grass and something sweeter—mock orange, maybe. A cricket sawed its legs together in a rhythm that wasn’t quite the frantic pulse of August. It was slower, more tentative. Spring’s last instrument testing a summer tune.

The argument began, as most did in the Fowler household, with a thermostat.

“The solstice isn’t until tomorrow,” Eloise said, reciting from her science textbook. “Summer starts on the solstice. June twenty-first.”

And underneath, in her father’s scribble:

Eloise and Margaret both turned. That was the kind of thing you said when you were an English professor.

Spring. But only until noon.