He does not approach the fence.

He has thought about this, in the two days since the footprint, in the way he thinks about things now — not directly, not with intention, but by circling, coming close and pulling back, the way you approach something you are not certain you want to know. He has arrived at no conclusions. He has arrived at the awareness that he is watching the fence the way he used to watch the door in his last year at the Accord, before he understood that watching it would not make it easier to walk through.

He is watching the fence when she appears.

She is young — twenty, twenty-five at most, he cannot tell from here. Dark coat, close-cut hair. She is standing at the gap in the corrugated panel, the one he keeps meaning to repair, looking through with the focused attention of someone who expected to see something and is deciding what to do now that they have seen it.

He goes still. Not hiding — it is too late for that, and besides, this is his yard. He simply stops moving and waits, which is something he has learned to do and which is not the same as doing nothing.

She doesn’t go. He expected her to go.

He picks up where he left off. Third row, three metres from where he stopped. He pulls a weed. Drops it. Reaches for the next one. He does not look directly at her but he tracks her in his peripheral vision the way you track weather — not anxiously, but with the knowledge that the situation can change faster than you can respond to it if you stop paying attention.

For a long time, neither of them moves.

The heron returns to the gantry. Looks at both of them in sequence, finds them equally unremarkable, turns back to face the middle distance.

Elias works along the row. He reaches the end of it and begins the next. The silence between them is strange — not hostile, not comfortable. Suspended. As if whatever is going to happen is waiting for one of them to make the first move and neither of them wants the weight of that.

She is the one who speaks.

He doesn’t hear the words. Too far, and the wind is coming from the wrong direction. But she said something — her lips moved, her body shifted slightly with the effort of it, that forward lean of someone offering a sound into uncertain air.

He stands up.

He does not move toward the fence. But he stops pretending to work, which is its own kind of answer.

He looks at her directly, for the first time. The distance between them is maybe thirty metres. He cannot make out her expression any better than she can probably make out his. But she is still there, and she said something, and that is already more than he expected.

He waits.

The city makes its river sound beyond the wall.

He waits.