I learn about Caleb’s early return the way I learn most things now.
Indirectly.
Not from you. Not from a conversation that invites reaction or interpretation. It comes through a clipped update passed along in neutral space, the kind of information designed to register without landing anywhere personal. Someone mentions a timeline adjustment while scrolling through reports. A deployment wrapped ahead of schedule. A return date pulled forward as if it were always meant to be that way.
Caleb is back.
Sooner than planned.
The words settle in my awareness with surgical precision. Too precise to ignore. Too clean. If I believed in narrative symmetry, I’d call it a correction. If I were still prone to dramatizing my own discomfort, I’d call it a consequence engineered by the universe, some c
