Theo came to the river every morning.
Not always at the same time, he was careful about that, varying his arrival by twenty minutes in either direction, which told me he had thought about it and decided that a pattern was a liability. I noticed the carefulness and filed it away as information about the kind of person he was. Careful without being anxious. Deliberate without being rigid. The kind of man who thought three steps ahead not because he was paranoid but because thinking three steps ahead had become, at some point, simply how he moved through the world.
We didn't always talk.
That was the thing I hadn't expected. I had assumed that his presence at the river was functional, information delivery, status reporting, the kind of structured communication that served a specific purpos
