The first thing Riley noticed was the sound.
Fall did not bark when he grew.
He made a low, hollow note, like wind blowing across the mouth of a very old horn, and it rolled out over the garden and set the washing line singing. The grass flattened under his paws as if he had weight enough to press it into the earth.
His bones slowly unfolded. There was no other word for it. His back lengthened and his legs stretched, long and lean, and the scruffy grey coat lifted off his spine and turned silver as frost on glass.
Then his head rose past the lowest branch of the apple tree, then past the top of the fence post that was no longer there, and his eyes lit up like two lamps set in a window, pale gold, steady, not blinking.
Riley's mind offered her explanations, one after another, the way a drowning woman grabs at driftwood. A trick of the storm light. A bad dream. A mistake she had made on the stairs and had not yet woken up from. None of them held.
