It’s like a switch had been flipped somewhere by some unseen hand, and the man by my side had morphed into someone else. Not that he’d ever been gruff with me before, but suddenly, by the third day of our trip, to be exact, I noticed a change in Gabriel. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but he seems to be watching my every move. And as attentive as he was before, he seemed to have ramped it up by a thousand.

It wasn’t anything overt, but maybe because I’d come to know him a ...