*Chris' POV*
I didn't realize how badly I needed to get out of the safe house until the door shut behind us and the car pulled away. It hit me in a slow, spreading wave, like breath I'd been holding for days without noticing.
The tension, the nerves, the weight of Audra's absence…
It all felt baked into those walls, like the place had swallowed every desperate thought and trapped them there with us, recycling the same stale fear over and over.
But now, as the road stretched ahead and the trees blurred in the late afternoon light, my head felt clearer. Maybe not clear, exactly, but less suffocating.
Movement helped.
The sense, real or imagined, that we were finally doing something helped. The fact that we had a direction to drive toward, a lead to follow, that helped most of all.
