Early in The Lending, Theta remembers the day her mother left her: a red suitcase shoved into a stranger’s car, the door slammed, the gravel crunching under the tyres.

Tyres, not tires. One letter swapped, and you’re in England.

That’s where Hemlock Lane is in the story. Yet I wanted it to feel like an old-world anywhere, far enough off the modern map that it belongs to whoever reads it. Holding it there comes down to many small choices about words.

Some I plant like a flag: grey, never gray; colour, with the u. They whisper, on every page, where you are.

Some I cannot use at all. Look again at that suitcase. I never told you where it went. In England it goes into the boot. In America it’s the trunk. Either word would have pulled someone out of the story. So it simply went into a stranger’s car.

In Gertie’s workshop, the long scrubbed pine worktable is a bench to an English writer and a counter to an American ear. So it is the worktable, and everyone sees the same worn wood and scattered herbs.

Some I keep, because the old word is better. The apothecary, never the chemist’s or the drugstore. You may not say it at home, but you understand it at once, and it carries more of the old world in a breath than a paragraph could.

And sometimes I choose the word both sides share. Bramwell taught Theta to braid the garlic. An English villager would more likely say plait, but braid is understood everywhere.

But here is what I love most: the world has begun to grow its own words. When Theta knocks the herbs off the worktable, she does not curse the way you or I might. She says, “Oh, hellebore!” It’s a poisonous winter flower pressed into service as a swear, the front of the word doing the work of the harsher one while the plant stays innocent. That is one the story discovered for itself.

You can tell a world is alive when it starts making words of its own.

Be luminous,

Ann