He had known.
Not in the specific, detailed way of someone who had run the calculation and arrived at the conclusion through deliberate reasoning — in the specific, prior way of someone whose body had already accepted the outcome before the eyes confirmed it, the heavy shoulders and the exhale arriving not as a response to what he was seeing but as the release of something that had been held in anticipation of it...
It would be a complete lie if I said I wasn't .expecting it.
