One year.
He was at the field.
The child was beside him — not held, standing, which had been happening for two months. Not steady yet. The specific wobbling upright of someone who had discovered that vertical was possible and hadn't yet worked out all the details.
The child was looking at the markers.
The ambient temporal awareness at one year was precise. Freda's documentation covered forty-seven pages at this point, the most comprehensive record of this specific development that existed.
What she'd documented in the most recent pages: the child had begun to distinguish not just between individual signatures but between when signatures were new and when signatures were accumulated. They could read temporal depth. Not consciously — not with language for it. But the awareness could tell the difference between something that had been in the field for a month and something that had been in the field for years.
The memorial field read as very deep.
