He is at a back table with six books spread around him and the look of someone who has been here long enough to lose track of whether he came in the morning or the afternoon.
He looks up when I come through the door.
His amber eyes meet mine across the library and something passes between us that has been passing between us since the east hallway, since the first time, since the collision of shoulder and my bag clasp and an old genealogy record sliding under a locker. Something that is getting less easy to attribute to coincidence the more times it happens.
I cross the library. I sit down across from him. I set my bag on the floor.
The books around him are all genealogy texts — pack genealogy, bloodline documentation, the dry academic literature of lineage that most people find intoler
