Toby nodded solemnly, then asked if he could have hot chocolate with two marshmallows as a thank-you to himself. They allowed it. Diplomacy required cocoa.
Before they left the cabin, Elise took the coral handbag from the closet and placed it in her own suitcase, not Daniel's. Daniel watched and did not argue. Ownership of the story, for now, had shifted. He carried the duffel that no longer hid anything under its clothes. Toby carried a pinecone he insisted was a pet named Captain.
On the interstate, Denver still hours ahead, Toby slept in the back seat, cheek mashed against the booster's side. The mountains fell away into plains. Elise drove. Daniel watched her profile in the fading light — the loose bun, the green eyes fixed on the road, the cream sweater swapped for a coat.
"When we get home," she said, without taking her eyes from the asphalt, "we call your parents first. Then the attorney. Then we draft the message to Mara. In that order. No more solo missions."
"No more solo missions," Daniel said.
She reached across the console with one hand. He took it. The wedding band on his finger pressed against her skin, a small circle that meant, among other imperfect things, a willingness to stay inside the hard pages.
They did not speak again for a long stretch. The silence was not the silence of the first night. It was the silence of two people rewriting a map while still on the trail.
In the last hour of the drive, Toby woke and asked for the story of how Mommy and Daddy met. It was a stalling tactic against boredom, and also, Elise suspected, a child's way of checking that the foundation still held. So Daniel told the grocery-store version — Elise arguing with a cashier about a double-charged avocado, Daniel behind her with a rotisserie chicken, offering a joke that should have failed and somehow did not. Elise added the detail Daniel always skipped: that she had gone home and told her roommate she had met a man with kind eyes and terrible timing. Toby wanted to know what terrible timing meant. Elise said it meant Daddy asked for her number while she was still mad about the avocado. Toby declared that avocados were worth being mad about. The car filled with a laughter that did not deny the week behind them; it simply refused to let the week be the only weather.