The fog in the Pacific Northwest doesn’t just obscure the view; it swallows the concept of time. In the valley, the days began to bleed into one another, marked only by the shifting temperature of the woodstove and the deepening resonance of the violin in the afternoons.
Ethan had taken to the woods. Not as a predator, but as a student. He spent hours tracing the moss on the north side of the hemlocks, his fingers moving with a slow, reverence that seemed to be an apology to every natural thing he had once been programmed to overlook. He was unlearning the efficiency of the Wolfe gaze, trying to see the world not as a series of tactical advantages, but as a living, breathing mess.
One evening, as the sun struggled to pierce through a bruise-colored sky, I found him in the small shed Juli
