She sat at the edge of the fountain like a punctuation mark in a sentence of sunlight—girl in pink, sleeves pushed up, knees tucked close. The park hummed around her: distant dog-walkers’ rhythms, a saxophone scraping warmth from the afternoon, the slow turning pages of a paperback someone had abandoned on a bench. Her dress caught the light in soft folds, the color not shouting but insisting—blush against the city’s gray grammar.