The message came on a Friday.
Celeste told me at the river.
She had started coming with me in the mornings, not every morning, not in a pattern that would register as deliberate, but often enough that it had become a natural thing, two sisters who happened to be early risers who happened to find themselves walking the same direction before the house woke up. Conrad had noted it. I had seen him note it. He had said nothing, which meant he was still in the phase of collecting rather than acting, still building his calculation, still deciding what the variable meant.
We had perhaps a few more days of that.
Perhaps less.
The October morning was the coldest yet, the kind of cold that arrived before dawn and had ice in its edges, that made the pine trees smell sharper and turned the river s
