Their friendship is almost a predestined thing: not the kind that is written in the patterns of stars, but the simpler kind of destiny that brings together people of like mind the same way gravity pulls leaves from the trees or magnets draw iron filings to attention. Never do either of them give much thought to the infinite momentous hammer of time and all things past that draws them together. And why should they? Rose and Callum are, after all, just products of their parents and the parents before them, like the rest of us, and to be otherwise is tantamount to impossibility.