35
The rest of the day was very awkward. Over dinner, Ian and Ash talked to each other very little. It was up to Gabe and me to make conversation, but since we were usually the quiet ones, we did a rather bad job of it. Finally, when we had eaten up our food, we quietly slipped away from the table, leaving Ian, Ash, and Ariadne. Ariadne looked like she wanted to talk to the two of them anyway, and sure enough, her lecturing voice rang out from the dining room soon after we’d left.
Gabe and I walked back side by side to our shared bedroom. We were silent, but it wasn't an awkward kind of silence; Gabe was the one person in the group who never scared or intimidated me. Of course, this was partly because he was almost the same age as me. In fact, he was younger than me—he wouldn’t turn four
