[Damien POV]
I do not go back to the office after the meeting.
I get in the car. I drive. I do not have a destination when I start and then I do, the way you sometimes know where you are going before you have consciously decided, the way the body navigates toward the thing the mind has not yet admitted it needs.
I end up at the cemetery.
I park on the service road and I walk through the gate and I find my mother’s grave the way I have always found it, without checking the map because I have been here enough times that my feet know the route even when the rest of me would rather they did not.
I sit down on the grass beside the stone.
I do not speak out loud. I never have. She is not here in any way that would receive words and I have never been able to pretend otherwise. But I come be
