Phase 2: THE PANTHEON
Chapter 30
Peace, I discovered, was a fragile physiological state. In the ICU, we called it baseline, the steady, unremarkable rhythm of a body not currently under attack. Baseline was not joy. It was not happiness. It was simply the absence of alarms.
For six months in the Scottish Highlands, I had lived at baseline.
The days were measured in small, survivable things. Morning fog lifting off the loch. The ache in my fingers after kneading bread. The familiar weight of a medical bag that now carried herbs alongside sterile gauze. I slept through the night. I stopped listening for helicopters. My pulse slowed enough that I no longer counted it out of habit.
But baseline always ends.
It ended on a Tuesday morning in November.
I was at the village clinic, a small
