The coordinates arrived on a Thursday night after a practice that had left both of us wrung out and quiet.
I didn’t send them in a message. I carried them with me across the frozen walkways, up the porch steps, and into the apartment the way I had been carrying everything else that mattered—carefully, consciously, with the old wound watching from its smaller chair and the newer want already pulling a chair up to the table. Damian opened the door on the first knock. He took one look at my face and the inventory he ran was faster than usual, more precise.
“You’re different,” he said.
“I have new coordinates.”
He stepped aside. I walked in, toed off my shoes, and stood in the entryway with my coat still on because taking it off felt like the first move in a sequence I needed to name out l
