The Shape of Someone Changed

She had chosen a table outside, even though the air was cold. She needed to see him coming.

He was half a block away when she spotted him — Daniel, still recognizably himself, same coat she remembered, same slight forward lean when he walked as though moving into a wind that wasn't there. But something was different in the way the crowd arranged itself around him. Not dramatically. People didn't part. They just seemed to resolve slightly, the way the eye finds order in a pattern without being told to look.

She had seen this in herself, lately. In mirrors. In the way Nadia had gone quiet on the phone. The quality of being legible in a new way, and not entirely in control of what you were saying.

When he sat down, he looked tired. Not sleepless-tired. Tired in a deeper register, as though he'd been carrying something for a long time and had recently put it down and was only now feeling the absence of the weight.

"You look different," she said.

"You too." He didn't sound surprised. He said it the way you acknowledge weather.

She wanted to ask him when it started. She wanted to ask if he'd received a letter, if he'd gone somewhere strange, if a woman with careful eyes had told him what he would lose. But the question she could not stop returning to was simpler and more frightening: what if none of those things had happened to him? What if the path worked differently on different people — or had found him through her?

She looked at his hands on the table. Still. Too still for Daniel, who used to gesture at everything.

"How long?" she finally asked.

He understood. She hadn't expected that either.