Chapter 179

Kade

The bond didn’t break. I kept waiting for it to.

I sat in the back of the truck with Garrick asleep in the front seat and Ivy’s grandmother’s pin closed in my fist, and felt it stretch. Mile after mile. Out past the lime trees and the river road, past old Thorne’s high straight walls, over the bridge at Millford and up into the long valley toward home. It went thinner with every mile. A rope, and then a cord, and then a single thread, and then something so fine I had to close my eyes and hold my breath to find it at all.

But it was there. Every time I looked for it, it was there. Very faint, very far, like a single note held a long way off.

She was sitting down. I could tell that much. Somewhere warm, and quiet. She was very tired, and very sad, and holding herself together the way she had held herself together in that hall, with both hands.

And under all of it, small and stubborn and steady, she was thinking of me.

I opened my hand an