(Cassidy)
I woke up and the room was darker than it had been.
Not fully dark. Just the kind of afternoon dark that came when the light started shifting and you'd been asleep long enough that the day had moved on without you.
Dane was beside me. His arm around me. His breathing slow and even.
I lay there for a moment without moving.
I sat up carefully so I didn't wake him and reached for the glass of water on the side table and drank half of it and sat there in the quiet of the room.
Next week we were leaving.
Not permanently. Not in a way that cut anything off. But leaving in the way that mattered. Waking up somewhere else. Coming home to somewhere else. The compound being something we visited instead of something we lived inside.
I thought about the section. The walls I'd looked a
