"So you did," he says. "In your own inimitable style."

He can hear the smugness in Caleb's voice, and knows it's more than deserved. Had he been so prescient at seventeen? Not about things like this, he thinks, if anything at all. His focus had been elsewhere, spread between day-to-day survival and the quest for more; that escape he'd been seeking, the promise of something glorious waiting somewhere just beyond his perception. He'd found it eventually--and even now, he chooses to believe the cost had been worth it. It had to have been.

"I'd like to think it was the apology that did the trick," Darlington continues, his smile showing no sign of fading quite yet, "but Alex hasn't let the blanket out of her sight since I gave it to her."