For the next three days, time didn’t pass so much as it thickened. We were living in a bubble of suspended animation, a breath held too long.
The cabin, usually a place of refuge, had turned into a war room. The air inside was stale, smelling of old paper, dry dust, and the dregs of cold coffee that sat in mugs on every available surface. Outside, the world was white and silent, the snow muffling everything. Inside, the silence was different. It was the heavy, pressurized silence of people waiting for a bomb to go off.
Guilermo spent his hours on the perimeter. I would see him through the frosted windowpanes, a dark silhouette against the blinding white of the tree line. He was restless. He paced the edge of the wards, his breath puffing out in clouds of steam, his hand always drifting t
