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Not dramatically wrong. Barrett hadn’t withdrawn from me or turned cold. If anything, he’d taken care of me with even more determination than usual. He’d serviced the Jeep last night, checked every piece of equipment twice this morning, packed enough food for a week, and put a second pair of dry socks in my pack without mentioning it.

But he hadn’t reached for me in bed when we woke.

He hadn’t kissed me while I made coffee.

And now, forty minutes into the caves, he kept looking back at me as though he wanted to say something and had decided he wasn’t allowed to.

His headlamp swept across the limestone as he ducked beneath a low shelf ahead of me. The passage wasn’t difficult so much as awkward, the floor rising and dipping beneath our boots while water trickled through shallow channels worn into the rock. Barrett had warned me about every slick patch before I reached it and moved every loose stone he thought might roll beneath my feet. Ten minutes ago, he’d taken my hand to guide me across a narrow run of water, then released it the instant I was safely on the other side.

That was when I knew I wasn’t imagining things.

Barrett didn’t need a reason to touch me anymore.

I knew why I was distracted. Yesterday’s phone call sat heavily at the back of my mind, along with the conversation I still needed to have with him. I should have told him over breakfast. I should have explained what the department had offered, what I’d said, and what I hadn’t said yet.

Instead, I’d watched him make sandwiches while telling myself we had plenty of time.

Grandma’s plant had waited decades. My conversation with Barrett could wait another few hours.

Probably.

“Watch your right foot,” Barrett said.

I looked down just before my boot landed on a patch of wet mineral deposit and shifted it onto dry limestone instead. “How did you even see that?”

“Know it’s there.”

I glanced ahead. “You know every slippery rock in this cave?”

“Pretty much.”

“That’s either impressive or deeply concerning.”

His mouth moved, not quite making it to a smile. “Been down here a lot.”

That was the first thing he’d said in several minutes that wasn’t an instruction about my continued survival, so I took it as progress.

I followed him around the bend, and the passage widened enough for me to walk beside him. The caves were cold, wet, and far more beautiful than Grandma’s pencil sketches had ever managed to convey. Our headlamps picked out curtains of calcite and pale limestone columns that had taken thousands of years to form. Water whispered somewhere beneath us, sometimes close enough that I could hear individual drops striking rock, sometimes fading until all I could hear were our footsteps and Barrett’s slower, deeper breathing.

He’d changed since we entered the caves. Not enough that I could point to any one thing, but his movements had become more deliberate, his shoulders slightly rounded, his head carried lower. Twice he stopped without warning and stood perfectly still, listening—or scenting, I couldn’t tell—to something beyond the reach of my senses. Both times, when I asked what it was, he’d frowned and told me he didn’t know.

The second time, he’d added, “Nothing bad,” with a certainty that made me wonder how he could possibly know that either.

Grandma’s map had been remarkably accurate.

She’d marked the first fork in the passage, the underground stream, and a narrow chimney where tree roots had broken through from somewhere far above. Her proportions weren’t perfect, and one passage had partially collapsed since she’d drawn it, but the landmarks were unmistakable.

She had been here.

I slowed, touching the plastic sleeve protecting the photocopy. For years, people had treated Grandma’s journals as the charming obsession of an eccentric woman. Even I had sometimes wondered how much of what she’d recorded had been observation and how much had been hope—particularly toward the end.

But she hadn’t imagined this.

She’d walked these caves. How, I had no clue. Grandma had never been a climber or a caver, at least not that I knew of. I tried to picture her down here with a flashlight and a backpack, picking her way over wet limestone and squeezing through narrow passages, and the image didn’t fit the grandmother I remembered.

Then again, most of these entries predated my memories of her. Before the illness. Before I’d known her as the woman who tired easily and kept a blanket over her knees even in summer.

Maybe there had been an entire version of Grandma I’d never known.