Two days travel. Caden and me, two warriors, and Rowan, who had insisted on coming and turned out, almost immediately, to be correct in his insistence.
The travel itself became its own kind of chapter in the way we were living it.
We had been building a life together inside the packhouse for weeks now, the study and the archive and the morning forms, all of it curated by familiarity and walls we had both grown comfortable behind. This was the first time we had been outside it together, in the ordinary world, in moving vehicles and roadside stops and the unscripted closeness of shared space that had nothing to do with the careful intimacy we had constructed at home.
We argued about directions within the first hour.
He was very certain about the route, the particular confidence of an Alp
