A second patch of morning
June found the first entry while sorting the garden notebooks at the house she had rented for the summer. In a neat hand, the previous tenant had written: 'Sunrise on the bench, 7:12. Second sunrise, 7:26.' Similar pairs of times filled the next page. Nothing else explained the phrase, and the owner remembered only that the tenant had been particular about where she drank her tea.
The garden was enclosed by brick walls, with a stone bench under climbing roses. June could understand sunlight arriving there later than it reached the open sky. She could not understand it arriving twice. The following clear morning she took her breakfast outside and watched a bright patch move across the bench, then disappear into shade.
Fourteen minutes later another patch of light appeared. It crossed the seat from a different direction and briefly lit the gravel underneath. June looked upward, but the sky held only one ordinary sun. The second patch was softer around the edges and vanished when a cloud passed, returning a moment after the cloud moved away.
She marked both positions with fallen petals and drew the shadows of the bench legs in her own notebook. The two patches did not merely arrive at different times. Their shadows pointed in different directions. Whatever the former tenant had called a second sunrise, it had taken a different route into the garden.