They left less than twenty minutes later.
By then, the storm had weakened into a cold, steady drizzle, but the mountains were still buried beneath thick gray fog. It clung to the trees and swallowed the narrow roads ahead of them, turning the forest into shifting walls of pine, stone, and shadow. Water dripped steadily from the branches overhead, and every so often the tires slipped on the wet gravel before Raymond corrected the wheel without saying a word.
Kaia sat in the back seat behind Rowan, staring out the window while the trees blurred past. She tried to focus on the road and the pale ribbons of fog drifting between the trunks, but the silence inside the SUV gave her too much room to think. The cabin already felt strangely distant, as though it belonged to another day instead of a
