The word again wasn't lost on anyone in the family, least of all Mara, who'd lived the first, harder version of it decades before Richard and Talia were born — a version with no cell phones, no video calls, nothing but a landline and an ocean of silence that had, eventually, nearly cost her everything.
"It's not the same," Talia said, sitting on Richard's dorm room floor a week after the draft, surrounded by half-packed boxes, watching him fold shirts into a duffel bag with more care than the task strictly required. "I know your grandmother's story. I know how that ended, the first time — the breakup, the years apart, all of it. This isn't that. We're choosing this. We're not being forced apart by anybody's parents or anybody's fear."
"I know," Richard said. "I do know that. I've just be
