The first month after leaving the Hale estate changed them.
Not all at once. There was no single morning when they woke up and suddenly looked like different people. It happened through the dirt that stopped bothering them, the clothes they stopped trying to keep clean, and the meals they learned to stretch because nobody knew when the next one would come.
By the time the Hales reached the end of that first month, they looked nothing like the family that had driven away from their estate.
Veronica still carried herself with the elegance that had always come naturally to her. Even with dust on her clothes and exhaustion beneath her eyes, there was something refined about her presence. She was still the socialite who had spent years moving comfortably through rooms filled with influential people, the woman who had run her household with quiet authority.
But the apocalypse had begun stripping away everything around that elegance.
