"Thank you, but I'm not interested, Travis."
"Just being friendly. This is a friendly town." He leans back in his chair and looks at me. "You're not from around here. Passing through?"
"Something like that."
"Well, if you need someone to show you around —"
"I don't."
"Come on. One drink. You're here, I'm here…" He takes a sip of his beer. He's not leaving. Men like Travis don't process rejection as information. They process it as a challenge.
Even if I weren't in the middle of the worst period of my life, even if I weren't off men entirely after Tyler, even if Travis were the last human male on the planet and the survival of the species depended on it — I would choose extinction. I would even walk back into that county jail and ask for a life sentence before I ended up in Duster with Travis.
"Holy shit." The voice comes from the bar. A younger guy with a cap has turned around on his stool and is staring at me. "That's Princess Pigpen."
"No way," says the guy next to him. He pulls out his phone. "You're right. That's her."
My stomach drops. Not again. I can't do this again. The diner, the photographers at the sanctuary, the bus, the street — there is nowhere in this town, nowhere in this entire godforsaken valley, where I can just exist without someone pointing and filming and laughing. My father has taken my money. My friends have dropped me. The entire internet has turned me into a meme. And I can't even sit in a bar in a town no one has heard of and drink a glass of bad wine without being hunted. At least in jail the walls kept the world out.
I stand up and put my phone in my purse. My wine glass tips and spills across the table and I don't stop to fix it. When I rush toward the door I hear them behind me — laughing, oinking, someone shouting "night night Pigpen" — and I push through the door and run.
14
MAGGIE
I'm driving back from Rosie's when I see her.
It's dark and the road between town and the sanctuary is unlit. My headlights catch something on the shoulder, a figure walking fast, head down. A woman alone, on foot. Which is unusual out here as nobody walks this road at night.
I slow down and when the headlights sweep across her, I realize it's Sloane.
My foot hovers over the accelerator. I could drive past. She's not my responsibility outside of working hours. But it's dark and there are trucks on this road that take the bends too fast and don't expect to find a pedestrian in a black dress in the middle of nowhere. And driving past a woman walking alone in the dark is not something I can do, even if that woman crashed into my barn.
I pull over and lean across to open the passenger window.
"Sloane."
She stops, turns and I see she's crying.
"Get in," I say.
She hesitates. She looks at me, then at the road ahead, clearly deciding whether she'd rather keep walking in the dark or accept a ride from a woman who's spent the last week making her shovel pig manure.
"Thank you," she finally says. She gets in, pulls the door shut and sits with her hands in her lap.
"Are you okay?" I ask, pulling back onto the road. "What happened?"
She shakes her head, pressing her lips together.
"Sloane. What happened?"
"I can't —" Her voice cracks. She clears her throat and tries again. "I can't go anywhere. I can't go to the diner without someone taking photos. I can't go to a bar without being recognized and mocked. I can't get on the bus without people filming me. Everywhere I go in this town, people either hate me or think I'm a joke and I just —" She stops and presses her fingers against her eyes. "I just wanted to sit somewhere and have a drink and be left alone. That's all I wanted."
"Where were you?"
"The Watering Hole."
Of course. Where else would she go for a drink? I glance at her. The Watering Hole on a Thursday night is mostly regulars — farmers, ranch hands, a few guys from the construction crew working on the highway extension. They're not bad people but they're loud and they drink and think they're funnier than they are.
