[PLACEHOLDER: opening paragraph of the story, written for the drop cap. The first letter will be set as a three-line drop cap, so begin with a strong word. Replace with real prose from Dr. Martin's manuscript — the kind of opening that sets the reader inside a place and a time without preamble.]
[PLACEHOLDER: a paragraph that introduces Annie Belle Crawford by way of the schoolhouse she ran for forty-four years on the rise above the river, the families whose children passed through her classroom, and the way her name still appears in the records of Hillside Cemetery.]
[PLACEHOLDER: a section that turns to Josiah T. Wheeler, his land north of the river, the lean years, and the way his ledgers thread through the same decades as the schoolhouse — the two of them passing each other on the road to town, the way small lives intersect across forty years.]
[PLACEHOLDER: a paragraph that develops the relationship between teacher and student, or between two figures whose lives ran parallel through the same cemetery's slow filling-in. Replace with real prose.]
[PLACEHOLDER: a closing section about the boy — now an old man — who came back to the Hillside grounds in the late 1950s to put a stone where there had been none, and what that visit revealed about the long shape of Annie Belle's classroom.]
[PLACEHOLDER: final paragraph — the kind of ending that doesn't tie itself off too neatly. Replace with real prose from the manuscript.]