The magic held steady at two and a half percent for most of the spring—the body, in its slow new arithmetic, accepting the lower level as the new normal, the way rivers accept the new shape of a redirected channel. The symptoms, accordingly, had settled into their own kind of plateau: the tremor in her hands, the silver hair, the bruises that appeared and took a long time to fade, the way the colds of the season found her more easily than they found the other women, took root in her chest, took ...