I got to the bench at five-thirty-eight.
Seven minutes before he runs past. I know the timing because I've heard the east perimeter path from the training room window for two years, the soft rhythm of footsteps on packed earth that I learned to identify without meaning to, the particular cadence of someone who runs the same route every day and has stopped thinking about it.
The bench is cold. The maintenance building behind it blocks the morning sun completely at this hour and the shadow it throws is the kind that holds damp, the wood of the bench slightly wet under my palms when I sit, the chill of it coming up through my jacket. Somewhere above me a pipe drips. Slow. Regular. Landing on concrete in a dark spot near the building's base, a stain spreading from years of the same drip in t
