Serena's POV)
He drove for twenty minutes before I understood we weren't going anywhere.
I had assumed, at first, that there was a destination — that the silence was simply the silence of someone who needed to collect themselves before speaking, the kind of quiet that precedes a difficult conversation rather than replacing it. I had been wrong before. I was wrong now.
He had taken the route out of the city, bypassing the turn-offs I knew, bypassing the neighbourhoods and the late-afternoon traffic and the ordinary geography of our lives. The streets thinned. The buildings fell away. The highway opened up ahead of us and bent, gently, inevitably, toward the estuary bridge — that long grey arch over the river mouth where it surrendered itself to the sea.
I had always found that bridge be
