He knew her before he fully saw her face.
The posture was different, the body grown, the edges of life visible in the set of her shoulders.
But there was something unchanged in the calm concentration of her movements, in the way she turned
to answer a child without breaking rhythm.
When she finally looked up, Isaiah felt twenty-two years collapse into one impossible second.
She was older than the girl in his memory and exactly herself.
‘Victoria,’ he said.
She looked at him politely, the way you look at a stranger who somehow knows your name.
Then he heard himself say the first thing that rose from the deepest part of his past.
‘You used to say squares felt stingy, so you cut sandwiches into triangles when you wanted them to feel generous.’
The knife stopped in her hand.
She stared at him.
Once.
Twice.
‘Isaiah?’
He laughed then, but it came out as something close to breaking.
