He was at the river before me on Thursday morning.
I came through the tree line at four fifteen with the cold pressing through my jacket and the dark still fully committed above the pines, and I saw him before my wolf told me he was there, which meant my wolf had already known and had simply declined to mention it, which was the kind of thing she had started doing lately that I had no framework for addressing.
He was standing at the bank.
Not sitting, not crouched, not doing anything that suggested he had settled in for a wait. Just standing at the edge of the water with his hands loose at his sides and his face toward the current, in the posture of someone who had arrived somewhere and was simply being in it, the way he was simply in every space he occupied, without the restless perfor
