I left on a Saturday morning.
Damien had a full day of meetings and a dinner he could not cancel and he told me the night before with the same even courtesy he brought to everything that he would not be home until late. I said that was fine. I said I had plans of my own. Both of those things were true in the way that half truths are true, technically and incompletely.
I got in the car at eight in the morning and I drove four hours south with the windows down and the radio off and nothing between me and my own thoughts except the road.
The town Nina had chosen was small and coastal and genuinely beautiful in the unhurried way that places are beautiful when they have not been discovered yet by people with money. The main street ran parallel to the water and the buildings along it were pai
