Elena made her calls before seven in the morning, when the house was quiet and the city below was still assembling itself, and the people she called were awake because the people she called had always understood that the early hours were when the real conversations happened.
She had maintained this network for forty years. It was not a formal network. There were no membership dues, no meetings, no shared name for what it was. It was simply a collection of women of a certain age who had survived certain circumstances and had developed, over time, the habit of staying informed about each other's worlds. They spoke in the language of ordinary things. They passed information through the ordinary words. Anyone listening would hear two old women discussing a grandchild's school, a property sale, a family event in the north. Anyone who understood the language would know exactly what was actually being said.
