The way back was made almost entirely in silence.
It wasn't the kind of silence Lohan knew from the other moments of his life, the heavy, empty kind that settled in when no one had anything to say, nor the tense silence of the days when the guild was under pressure.
It was something new, warm, that filled the whole space of the car like a third presence, and that made every small sound take on a strange weight, the hum of the ion turbines, the creak of the leather when one of them shifted, the soft sound of Isabella's breathing beside him.
He kept his eyes fixed on the route drawn across the windshield, his fingers firm on the wheel, and made an enormous effort to look like a normal person, someone who drives a car and thinks about anything else.
