rain

Hazel is looking out of the window. It's raining. Hazel likes rain, which is quite lucky with the amount that England gets. If it's quiet and raining, at least there's something to mask the silence. Hazel's noticed that some sounds, like quiet music or the sound of typing, don't stop the silence. You can still hear the emptiness, behind the noise. But traffic noise, people talking in another room, and rain - they're background noise, and that's what Hazel needs.
The scratchlike lines and scattered tapping merge into a steady hiss and sheets of rain that you can only see if you look behind it, and Hazel keeps watching.
The only way you can see the drops without looking somewhere else is to look at the plants. Hazel tries not to notice the way all the leaves are curved to let everything drip off - she's not one to let biology spoil the moment.
This is the kind of heavy rain that noone likes to walk in, the kind that sticks all your eyelashes together and waterlogs your skin. The kind that means Abigail wil have to find her wellies if she wants to go in the garden without getting mud up to her elbows.
Hazel likes to stand outside sometimes, in the needle-thin silent rain that freezes your bones, for just long enough to let her enjoy the feeling of warming up again. But this heavy, almost solid downpour would soak her within seconds, would make it a necessity rather than a pleasure.
Hazel remembers that the only reason she noticed that it was starting to rain was that she was supposed to be closing the curtains, and does so before anyone notices she's lost in a world of her own.