I sat in the car for a long moment with the engine off, listening to the silence settle around me.
It was not truly silent. The mountain had its own language: wind moving through pine canopy in long, slow exhalations, a creek somewhere below finding its way over stones, the distant call of a bird I couldn’t name.
But after three years of the particular silence of an empty house, this felt different. This felt alive.
Michael had stood here. I understood that immediately and without question, the way you understand certain things not through evidence but through some deeper form of knowing.
