So I focus on what I can do.
Sierra’s car gives me somewhere to put my hands. The engine’s gone—no point pretending otherwise—but I track down a replacement a couple of hours away and haul it back to the shed. It’s not the smartest move. She’d be better off scrapping the whole thing and putting the money toward something newer.
But this isn’t really about the car.
It’s about having something in front of me that I can take apart and put back together again. Something that responds when I work on it.
So I strip the old engine out piece by piece, setting everything aside, preparing the space for the replacement. It’s slow, heavy work, the kind that leaves my hands aching and my mind quieter. For a few hours at a time, it’s enough.
In between that, I walk.
Hours at a time, circling the land, mapping it out in my head. Every ridge, every dip, every place someone could hide if they wanted to get close without being seen. I trace paths that don’t exist yet, testing angles, sightlines, escape routes.
We’re all doing something.
None of it touches what’s really there.
At night, the quiet presses in harder. Reid retreats into himself, speaking less, carrying something I can almost feel pressing down on him. Luke swings the other way—louder, sharper, filling the space with noise that doesn’t quite land. Sierra moves between us, steady and watchful, like she’s trying to hold something together before it comes apart.
And me…
I just feel it.
The imbalance.
The way something is building with nowhere to go.
We’re wound too tight. Sitting in it too long. Waiting. Carrying things we’re not meant to carry on our own.
We need a release.
Not distraction. Not avoidance.
Something that shifts us. Grounds us. Pulls us back into each other instead of letting us drift further apart inside our own heads.
I don’t arrive at it logically.
It just… comes to me.
A place I haven’t brought anyone before.
I stop mid-step on the trail, looking out through the trees as the idea settles into place, simple and certain.
Yeah.
That’s what we need.
It’s not about the view. Not really.
It’s about what that place does to you when you’re there. The quiet. The weight of it. The way everything else seems to fall away for a while.
If anything can break this tension—wash some of it out of us—it’s that.
The only problem is getting them there without overexplaining it.
In the end, I keep it simple.
I tell them I need to get off the retreat for a few hours. That I think we all do. I mention a spot I know up in the mountains—a place worth seeing. Nothing more than that.