“She gets scared and then she gets loud.

You know how she gets.”

“I know how she gets.”

He smiled at that, a small, rehearsed smile.

“You always could see straight through her.”

We strolled the path around the pond, slowly, because he kept stopping to point things out, a heron, a new pergola, as though we were old friends catching up.

Then he stopped walking entirely.

“Fifty thousand,” he said.