As we walked toward the car, the air was sharp with the smell of exhaust and London rain, but for the first time, it didn't feel suffocating. We were a unit again. The drive out of the city was a blur of concrete flyovers and orange streetlights. Peter drove with a quiet focus, sensing that Mama and I needed the space of the backseat to simply exist in the same zip code again.

"We're stopping in Bristol," Peter announced as we hit the M4. "The cottage is too far for one night, and frankly, I think we all need a night where the walls aren't listening to us. I've booked a B&B near the harbor. It's got creaky floors and no 'World's Okayest' anything in sight."

The B&B in Bristol was a tall, eccentric townhouse with windows that looked out over the dark, shimmering water of the Floating Harbour. Inside, it smelled of old floorwax and sea salt. Peter had strategically chosen a place that felt like a neutral territory—a bridge between the suffocating order of London and the wild, stone-hewn reality of the Valleys.

After a quiet dinner, Peter disappeared to "find a pub with a decent bitter," leaving us alone in the high-ceilinged room. We sat by the window, the lights of Bristol reflecting in the dark water outside. The silence was comfortable now, no longer the heavy, expectant silence of a week ago.

"Do you remember the first day?" I asked softly, my hand covering hers on the windowsill. "At the art camp? Before everything got... heavy?"

She smiled, a genuine, nostalgic flicker. "You were wearing that ridiculous paint-stained shirt. You looked like you'd lost a fight with a bucket of cerulean blue. I thought you were the most arrogant person I'd ever met."

"And I thought you were a mystery I'd never solve," I countered. We began to pull at the threads of the previous year—the youth art event where we'd first met, a whirlwind of creative workshops and late-night talks about symbolism and the "meaning behind the image." We remembered the way we'd gravitated toward each other, two fifthteen-year-olds who felt like they were vibrating on a different frequency than everyone else.

We talked about the "difficult situations" of that first year—the first time the "drift" had happened in front of me during a gallery visit, and how I'd simply sat with her on the floor until the world came back. We remembered the first time I'd traveled to London to visit her, the shock of seeing the "Greenwich Performance" her parents insisted on, and the moment we'd realized that the only place we felt "whole" was when we were together, away from the expectations of everyone else.