He came through the tree line at the moment the sky went from black to the deep blue that preceded everything else.
I heard him before I saw him. The even unhurried footsteps on the path through the pines, the specific rhythm of someone who knew the route well enough now that the dark did not require him to slow for it. I had learned his footsteps the way I had learned every footstep in this house, by repetition, by the accumulated sensory memory of hearing them in different contexts until the pattern was specific enough to be identified without looking.
These footsteps I had not learned in the pack house.
I had learned them here.
At this river. On this path. In these dark morning hours that had started as mine alone and had become something else in the weeks since he came back and sto
