The drive to Damian’s place felt unreal.
Too quiet.
Too smooth.
Too expensive.
His car moved through the city like the rest of us were temporary inconveniences and it had somewhere far more important to be. Outside the tinted windows, traffic crawled, lights blurred, pedestrians crossed streets with coffee cups and headphones and ordinary lives, and somehow all of it felt offensively normal.
Inside the car, no one was pretending.
My mother sat beside me in the back seat, one hand still clenched around her handbag, the other resting too close to mine without quite touching it. Across from us, tension had settled into the leather and silence like a fourth passenger. Damian was on the phone in the front, speaking in that cold, clipped tone that meant he was already building the kind of
