The drive back was quiet.
Different from the drive there, which had been the operational quiet, the focused silence of people moving toward something. This was the quiet of people moving away from something, the particular atmospheric quality of a car full of people who have just been in a room where significant things happened and are now in the process of absorbing what the significant things mean.
Dane drove.
Matteo sat beside me in the back and he was not on his phone and he was not looking at the window. He was looking at the road ahead of us with the unfocused quality of a man whose eyes are pointing at something and seeing something else entirely, something interior, something that was not the Italian countryside moving through the headlights but the contents of the last two hour
