I never looked for omens or placed much stock in coincidences. But there was something about my thinking around that time that made me begin seeing them everywhere. Perhaps the meetings were honing my perceptivity, or conditioning my brain not to disregard the sights and sounds that felt incongruous. When these moments appeared, I did not discount them as I once had, but tried to make space for them to reveal to me whatever it was they held. For instance, on my jog one morning, just as the mist was burning off, a coyote darted out into the middle of the road. I stopped, and I stared at him and I realized, to my delight, that he was the same coyote I saw the night I first noticed The Hum. The same white tips on his ears, the same white triangle patch on his neck. He was much larger now, almost an adult. His coat was shiny and thick. His large, bat-like ears stood upright, flicking back and forth, perceiving sounds I could only imagine. I stood there admiring him, and he looked back at me, letting me admire him. And I talked to him. Look at you, I said. You’re the most perfect thing in the universe.

I took a cautious step towards him. I didn’t know whether I should look him in the eyes or not. I didn’t want him to think I was menacing him, so I fixed my gaze somewhere just below his, like Kyle had done to me when I entered Howard and Jo’s living room for the first time. I crouched down and slowly stretched out my hand. It was trembling. What was it to touch something so wild? Had I ever touched a truly wild animal before? No, I didn’t think I had, which struck me as remarkable, in four decades. Maybe once, when I held an injured sparrow as it died, after smacking into our patio door. But an injured wildness, a compromised wildness, didn’t count. I looked up and met the coyote’s eyes again. Only four or five metres separated us. He held my gaze, unblinking. He lowered and extended his head ever so slightly towards me, as if bowing, flattening his ears as he did. Did this signal a greeting, or a pending attack? With knees bent, I made to take another step forward, but he startled and darted off into a nearby yard. I stayed crouched in the street, heart beating, until a car beeped its horn behind me.

The other wildness I attempted to reach out and touch during that time was Ashley. I gradually got closer, day by day. A text message returned here. A thirty-second conversation in the kitchen there. I started calling her Boo Radley, for her spectral presence in the house, or sometimes the more hip-hop-inflected My Boo, or even Boo-urns, a reference from The Simpsons that cracked a smile on her face. There was still a strict moratorium on my attending her games, not that I could bear being seen by former colleagues and students and their parents anyway. The unspoken reason why I would never again be invited was that she blamed me for her fall from grace. She had been one of the strongest on her team at the start of the season, but by May her coach more or less had her benched.