He asked me to walk with him.
Not the perimeter — we had been doing that again since the clearance, the easy evening walk that had become one of the compound's quiet constants. This was different. He came to find me in the kitchen with the specific expression of a man who had something he had been organizing and was ready to say.
"The river," he said.
"Now?" I said.
"Now," he said.
We walked through the compound and into the tree line and along the path that had become ours — the one that passed the tributary and opened toward the northern boundary where the main river ran.
He did not speak until we reached the bank.
Then he stood looking at the water for a moment.
"Tell me something true," I said, because the expression on his face was the organizing-something expression and somet
