Three and a half hours until everything changes.
I tighten my grip on the wheel and try not to think about how my rules never accounted for this:what happens when the only thing you want is the one thing you can’t control?
TWENTY-FOUR
HARPER
The trip should have takenfour hours.
Instead, it’s taken all day.
There was traffic—or at least, Caleb claimed there was traffic. He took every back road, every scenic route, and every possible detour that added precious minutes of togetherness.
When he suggested fast food, I pointed to the sit-down place that would take longer for the food to come. After a slow meal, I kept getting refills on coffee. Then dessert.
By the time we pulled into another diner for dinner, I was still stuffed from lunch, but I made Caleb stop anyway. Then ordered food that sat untouched on the table, growing cold while I memorized the way the light of the little overhanging booth lamp hit Caleb’s face. Theway his fingers drummed against his water glass. The way he looked at me.
The easy chatter from earlier had died out by that point. There was nothing left to say. Just the weight of what we were driving toward.
But I wanted to juststareat him. At his face. To bask in his calming, loving presence for as long as I could steal it.
As we get closer—finally making it past Nacogdoches—I’m dying inside.
What am I doing?
He loves me.
He doesn’t know you. He loves who hethinksyou are. He doesn’t know what an ugly, scaly, reptilian, cold-blooded thing you actually are. No one could love you.
Z does.
Or thinks he does.
Helen might have.
Until Silas turns on her. Then she’d hate us both—as she should. She wouldn’t be able to help it. No one’sthatgood.
I’m doing the right thing. The only thing.
I’m fucking surviving. And surviving was never pretty. It was never chocolate chip cookies and milk by a roaring fireplace.
It’s being sweaty and hungry in the woods with the mosquitoes and the bobcats. And then in the winter, the cold.
It’s being more animal than human.
“Take the next left,” I whisper, half hoping Caleb won’t hear.
But he does hear. And he switches on his blinker—like the good Boy Scout he never got the opportunity to be—and turns onto the road that leads to what I used to call home.
There’s no “recycle air” button in a car this old, and the stink from the chicken factory starts kicking in through the vents halfway down the road that leads to hell. When I lived here, I became immune to it, but now that I’ve been away?—
I hear Caleb choke a little. He’s trying not to gag, and I feel the same, because it’s hitting me for the first time all over again.
This is where I’m from.
This iswhatI am.
“Here,” I say, not much louder, when I see the rusted-out sign for the GRASS VALLEY Trailer Park. Except in addition to the missing V, someone has spraypainted out the GR, so now it’s ASS ALLEY Trailer Park.