Illinois flattens into Wisconsin gradually, the way things change when you are not watching for them.
I have my notebook in my bag, and I do not open it. I watch the window instead. Farmland and water towers and the particular quiet of a Saturday morning on a highway going somewhere that is not Chicago.
Caden drives. He does not fill the silence, and neither do I, and it is the comfortable kind that has nothing to prove.
An hour in, he tells me about the weekend. Twelve guests. Old money is mostly people who have been in his circle long enough to remember versions of him he does not talk about. They will be watching the engagement with the specific attention of people who knew what came before it.
"Three of them knew Sofia," he says.
I turn from the window. "Personally."
"Yes."
I th
