Verity's pov

It was strange… how numbers had never meant anything to me before.

I watched Caleb as he crouched beside me, drawing lines and squiggles in the dirt with the stick he'd snapped from a fallen branch. I sat cross-legged on the grass, my eyes following every movement he made like they held the key to the world. Maybe they did.

“This is one,” he said, pointing to a straight line. “And this is two.” He added a curved shape beside it. “Three. Four. Five.”

I nodded ...