You are twenty-three. You are at Denver International. It is four-twenty in the afternoon on Tuesday, the tenth of November, and the light coming through the tall tent-roof windows of the main terminal is the clean high light of the Front Range at altitude in late autumn, sharper than any light you left in Prague.
The bag comes off the carousel third. You recognize it by the yellow ribbon you tied at BER in July 2025 and have not untied since. The bag now has Prague in it, which is to say the monograph Jana gave you, the photocopy of the staircase, the scan, the document you have carried since New York, the notebook, the toothbrush, the one clean sweater, and a plum from the pension-woman that did not get eaten.
Your ears are still adjusting from the descent — the specific inner-ear unfamiliarity of a five-thousand-foot elevation after sea-level JFK that you did not grow up knowing. You swallow once. Your ears do not pop.
You take the escalator down to the train.
The train between concourses is automated. A voice that sounds like it was recorded in 1994 says arriving at Concourse A. Please stand clear of the doors. A woman beside you has two children and a small dog in a soft carrier. The dog is not barking. The children are holding the mother's coat. She nods at you once with the nod Americans use to acknowledge another American, which you had forgotten was a thing Americans do.
Outside the air is dry and cold. Your body registers the dry before it registers the cold; Prague was cold-damp and Denver at altitude is cold-dry and they are not the same cold. Your scalp knows this before you do.
The shuttle has a placard with your father's street taped to the inside of the window. The driver is a man of maybe fifty wearing a canvas jacket that has Mile High Shuttle embroidered on it. He nods.
Cherry Creek?
Cherry Creek.
Forty, forty-five, depending on I-225.
You say thank you. He puts the bag in the back and you get in the second row because there is already a woman in the front row with a stack of folders on her lap.
The shuttle pulls onto Peña Boulevard. Outside the window the plains begin at the airport and end at the mountains, which you can see as a grey line at the far edge of the horizon to the west with snow on the upper half. You have seen the mountains in photographs. You have not seen the way the plains arrive at them from the east — the approach is a different thing from the picture. The approach is forty minutes of dry brown grass, low rooflines, billboards for things you do not know, the mountains not closer for a long time and then closer quickly.
The driver does not talk. The woman in front does not talk. The shuttle hums. A dashboard light — small, amber, the kind that means something to the driver and nothing to you — goes on and off every few minutes the way a heart goes on and off. You watch it without watching it.
I-225 is not bad. You turn off at Hampden. The streets go quieter. Cherry Creek is suburban in a way you are not used to, with wider streets and wider yards and fewer people walking and everybody in cars. The register of this city is not walking, it is driving, and the driving is a separate body you do not have yet.
The driver pulls into a driveway that is broader than any driveway you knew growing up. A two-car garage. A porch with two Adirondack chairs. The house is red brick to the second floor, cream siding above, 1990s-build, well-maintained. A Colorado blue spruce in the front yard. A cottonwood by the mailbox whose last yellow leaves are still on in mid-November.
The driver takes your bag out of the back. You pay him. The fare is sixty-eight dollars; you give him eighty and he says have a good one without looking at you.
You stand at the base of the driveway.
Charlotte is at the front door.
She is eight. She has grown since the last photograph you saw of her; she is thinner in the shoulders and her hair is longer. She is wearing a purple sweater with a white unicorn on it that is older than she is — a cousin's hand-me-down or a thrift-store find, you can tell by how the fabric has softened. She has on socks without shoes. She is standing in the open doorway looking at you and not waving.
You raise a hand. She raises a hand.
She does not come down the steps. You pick up the bag and walk up the driveway.
The house smells of wood, faintly, and of something that might be cinnamon, faintly. In the mudroom to the left of the front door there are three pairs of work-boots arranged in a row — two pairs your father's, one pair smaller that might be a borrowed set or your stepmother's — and a neat stack of split pine firewood against the wall that goes from floor to waist-height. The pieces are split to the same size. Whoever split them split them carefully.
You set the bag down.
Charlotte says, Your plane was late.
You say, It was.
Dad says fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes is not bad.
No.
She looks at you and she looks at the bag and she looks at your face and she does something with her mouth that is not quite a smile. She turns and walks into the house without saying anything else, and you follow her, and she takes you to the guest room, and she points at the bed and the dresser and the lamp as if she is briefing you. Then she walks out and you are standing alone in the room with your jacket still on and Prague still in the body and Denver just beginning.
Outside the window, the dry cold. You take off the jacket.