Marcus Voss arrived on a Tuesday in March, which Eli had come to accept was simply the day his life happened on.
He came on foot — appeared at the end of the street in the late afternoon, tall and lean and carrying nothing, looking at the house he had not seen in seventeen years with an expression that did not try to be anything other than what it was.
Eli was on the porch. He had known — an hour ago, the compass in his pocket had shifted orientation, from pack-north to something more specific — and had sat on the porch steps in the March cold and waited.
They looked at each other from fifty feet.
His father was older than he'd expected and looked more like him than he was prepared for — the same amber eyes, the same angular face, same dark hair now threaded with gray at the temples. He walked the way Eli had been learning to walk: deliberate, balanced, taking in everything.
He stopped at the foot of the porch steps.
"Eli."
"Yeah."
"I owe you—" he started.
"Not right now," Eli said. "Come inside. My mother made dinner."
A pause. Something in his father's face rearranged itself from the set expression of someone who has been carrying something for a very long time to something simpler and less armored.
"Okay," Marcus Voss said.
Eli held open the door.
Inside, something was beginning.
— END —