The Summer

He had told Cora he wanted to spend the summer glad, and he did, and it turned out to be the strangest discovery of his life: that a man who knows exactly when he's going to die becomes, for the time he has left, almost unbearably awake.

Everything got sharp. Everything got loud and bright and dear. Owen had spent thirty-three years the way most people spend their lives, half-watching, letting the ordinary days slide by because there'd always be another one. Now there was a circle on a chart, and behind the circle there was nothing, and it did a thing to the days. It made them enormous. He'd be drinking his coffee on the back step in the morning with the mist coming off the Hollow and the birds going and Maddie's slippers scuffing in the kitchen behind him, and the plainness of it would hit him so hard he'd have to hold the cup with both hands. He had been given a deadline, and a deadline, it turned out, was just another word for pay attention.