The days acquired a rhythm and I let them.

  That was the strange part — not that he came back, but that I organized my mornings around it. Not consciously. I didn't wake at dawn and think: the boy will be here soon, I should be presentable. I didn't wake at all, mostly. Sleep was a habit I maintained out of nostalgia, the way someone might keep a chair they never sat in because it had once belonged to someone who mattered.

  But I found myself at the same birch. At the same hour. Facing the same direction — toward the village, where the first smoke would rise from the cooking fires and from which, eventually, the sound of his footsteps would emerge.

  I told myself it was the tree. It was a good tree. Well-positioned. Comfortable bark.

  The village existed in the background of my awareness like a painting hung in a room I walked through daily. I saw it without studying it. Smoke, movement, the muted sounds of a community too small to thrive and too stubborn to die. The dog barked at the same hour each morning — not at anything, just at the principle of morning. Children chased each other in the dirt near the well, their laughter sharp and bright and as meaningless as birdsong. A woman carried water. A man sharpened a tool he'd sharpened yesterday. The rhythms of survival repeated themselves with the dull reliability of a heartbeat.

  I had watched villages like this for longer than any of them could comprehend. They were stubbornly identical in their essentials: the same needs, the same hierarchies, the same quiet conflicts over resources that were never quite enough. And yet each one thought it was the first — the first to struggle, the first to pray, the first to discover that the harvest and the weather did not negotiate.

  He arrived each morning with the regularity of a natural phenomenon. He had become as predictable as the sunrise and approximately as avoidable. His basket contained an evolving catalog of the forest's offerings — each day slightly less lethal, each day organized with slightly more intention. He was learning through proximity, absorbing information that I hadn't technically given him, like a sponge that had decided to sit next to a spill.

  "Old Lan's goat got loose again," he said on the seventh morning, sorting roots beside me with the comfort of someone who had decided that this arrangement was permanent. "Third time this month. She wanders into the Bai family's garden and eats the cabbages. Mrs. Bai says she'll cook the goat next time. Old Lan says Mrs. Bai couldn't cook water."

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  I picked a beetle off my sleeve. Set it on the ground. It wandered away with the unhurried confidence of a creature that had no idea how small it was.

  "But the real problem is that his granddaughter — she's eight — she follows the goat every time. Into the forest. Past the safe boundary. And nobody notices because everyone's busy fighting about the cabbages."

  Something in his tone shifted. The story about the goat wasn't a story about a goat. It was a story about a village that was too busy surviving to pay attention to its children. An eight-year-old, following an animal past the tree line, into territory where spirit beasts roamed and where the only thing standing between a child and a very permanent consequence was luck.

  "I brought her back yesterday," he said. Casual. As if retrieving a child from spirit beast territory was the same as returning a borrowed cup. "She was sitting by the creek. Playing with rocks. There were tracks nearby — not badger."

  He glanced at me. Quick. Testing.

  I looked at the root in his hand. "That's a weed."

  He looked at the root, looked at me and threw the weed over his shoulder. "So the tracks—"

  "Deer."

  "Deer," he repeated flatly. "Not wolf."

  "Deer."

  "Are you sure? Because they were big and—"

  "Deer do not typically attack eight-year-olds."

  "But spirit deer might, right? If they're qi-enhanced—"

  "That was a normal deer."

  He considered this. Nodded once. Filed it away somewhere in the disorganized archive that served as his brain.

  "Also, Old Chen's wife asked about you. Wanted to know if you're the herb woman from the east that the traders mentioned. I said you were my grandmother."

  I turned my head to look at him. Slowly. With the slowness that communicates a response no words could improve upon.

  He grinned. "What? You look like you could be somebody's grandmother. A very... well-preserved grandmother."

  I returned my gaze to the forest. The beetle I'd set down had reached the edge of a leaf. It paused, considering its options. I sympathized.

  "What should I tell them?" His voice was quieter now. "The village. When they ask. Because they ask. People in small villages ask about everything, especially about things that aren't their business."

  There were several dozen answers to this question, most of them variations on nothing. Tell them nothing. Tell them I'm passing through. Tell them I don't exist.

  "Tell them nothing," I said.

  "That'll make them more curious."

  He was right. It would. Small villages ran on curiosity the way rivers ran on gravity — it was the force that moved everything and fighting it was like trying to convince water to flow uphill.

  "Tell them what you want," I said.

  He was quiet for a moment. Pulled another root from his basket. Held it up.

  "This one?"

  "Wrong."

  He threw it over his shoulder. Reached for the next.

  The morning continued. The village smoked and murmured behind us. The forest waited ahead. Somewhere between the two — between the life he came from and the silence I carried with me — we sat on opposite sides of a boundary that neither of us had named and neither of us crossed.

  Not yet.