Meet and greet? On winter mornings in the Danube Delta, that phrase takes on a different temperature entirely. The canals are skinned with ice, cracked like a dropped mirror, and the fishermen come home slow and stiff, boats coughing gas breath into the cold. She appears then, one cat, not a committee. Black as damp peat, freckled with brown like old rust, a negligent splash of white on her chest as if fate lost focus for a second. She does not run. She calculates. One ice plate, then the next.