THE MATE HE REFUSED
Soren told me.
Not deliberately, I don’t think. Or not deliberately in the way it landed. It came out the way significant things often do, mid-conversation, unguarded, slipping through the cracks of something else entirely. The kind of truth that doesn’t wait for permission.
We were walking the eastern trail, doing a boundary assessment for council records. The air was sharp with early wind, the ground still holding the damp memory of recent rain. Soren was talking about Silverwood in the years I had been gone,the changes, the tensions, the small details that never made it into formal reports.
He was good at it. Precise. Unsentimental. Careful not to shape the truth into anything that would feel like interpretation.
And then he said, almost casually, “She arrived t
