The drive into town was quiet, the kind of quiet where words sat unspoken between them, heavy but understood, filling the space of the old truck's cab like invisible passengers they had learned to travel with. Lila found herself fiddling with the hem of her blue cotton skirt—one of the few she owned that wasn't stained with grape juice or soil—as the narrow road curved between ancient olive groves and fields that had gone golden in the relentless heat of late summer.
The landscape rolled past the windows in waves of amber and green, punctuated by the dark silhouettes of cypress trees that stood like exclamation points against the bright sky. She had made this drive dozens of times over the past few years, had memorized every turn and rise in the road, yet today it felt different somehow,
