I jog a few short steps to catch up to Oliver while the memory finishes clicking into place in my head.
His silhouette walking ahead, hammer balanced on his shoulder like a broom that weighs too much, drags back a memory I didn't even know I'd kept whole.
It wasn't the Oliver of this timeline. Not exactly. The posture was different, the profession was different, even the energy around him seemed to have been pulled down a different road.
Still, some things stayed the same from one world to the next: the stubborn kindness, the practical intelligence, and that laugh too big to fit in small places.
Oliver Kaminski.
Lifeguard of the WaterMarks' first patrol.
Of course I wouldn't have recognized him right away.
In the other timeline, he wasn't a WaterStrand farmer lost in an abandoned subway, nor a man hauling Motorhead around as if life were a sequence of problems that could be solved with strength, patience, and a nagging wife.
