Chapter 1
Lola
The highway doesn’t forgive hesitation. I learned that about three states back, somewhere between the moment my name hit the news bulletins and the moment I stopped checking my phone.
Hesitation is how they catch you. Hesitation is how you end up on the side of the road with your hands behind your back and someone else’s story written all over your record.
So I don’t hesitate.
I drive.
The sun is bleeding out slowly across the horizon like it’s in no particular hurry to die. Golden light smears itself across the cracked dash of my borrowed car—borrowed being a generous word fortaken fromsomeone who owed me and wasn’t man enough to pay up—and I’ve got the windows down because the AC gave out somewhere in New Mexico and I’ve stopped being precious about things like comfort.
The air changes when I cross into the valley.
I notice it before I notice anything else. It shifts. It’s not cooler, butsofter, like the pressure drops by a fraction and the world exhales. It smells like river water and pine resin and something underneath that I don’t have a word for yet. Something living. Something layered.
I roll my shoulders and tell myself it’s just the elevation.
The road narrows. Two lanes become one and a half, the white line faded to a suggestion, and the trees press in closer on either side before opening suddenly, dramatically, like a curtain being pulled back by someone with a flair for the theatrical. And there it is.
Sweetwater Valley.
It’s ridiculous, is my first thought. A town that looks like someone describedquaintto an architect who’d never seen quaint but was really going to give it a go. Main Street is actual cobblestone—cobblestone, in this century—lined with storefronts that still have hand-painted signs and window boxes full of brightly colored flowers. There’s a clock tower. An actual clock tower, lit from below, casting warm gold up into the darkening sky.
My second thought is:nobody looks for you in a place like this.
That’s the thought I’m keeping.
I ease off the accelerator without meaning to. The engine drops from its anxious hum to something quieter, and the car drifts down the main drag at the speed of someone who belongs here, who is in no hurry, who did not spend the last seventy-two hours white-knuckling a steering wheel across four state lines because her supposed best friend decided to torch her life for a payout.
Don’t.
I press the thought flat before it can grow legs. Amber is a problem I don’t have the bandwidth for right now. Amber is a locked box on a high shelf, and I will get to her. I will absolutely, categorically, with great personal satisfactionget to her.But not tonight. Tonight I need gas, food that isn’t a gas station hot dog, and somewhere to park that isn’t a rest stop with security cameras positioned at the only exit.
The town is… busy?
That surprises me. I’d expected quiet. The deep, blanketed quiet of a place where everyone’s inside by eight and nothing happens after sundown. But there are people out. A lot of people. Strung lights arc between buildings down a side street, and I can see the skeletal frames of stalls being assembled in what looks like a park or town square. There’s scaffolding and canvas and cheerful, organized chaos that means something’s being built. A festival, maybe. A market?
A carnival.
As I roll past the turnoff, I can see it more clearly.Rides are in various stages of assembly, the skeletal arm of a Ferris wheel is reaching up against the indigo sky, a row of what will clearly be food stalls judging by the industrial equipment being wheeled past by a teenager who looks deeply unimpressed to be doing it. Strings of globe lights hang between poles, not yet switched on, but catching the last of the dusk in little blank circles of glass.
The whole street smells like fried sugar and sawdust and river water.
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with carnivals. With anything that promises warmth and light and an atmosphere that fosters safety and happiness. I know too much about what holds up the backdrops.
I keep driving.
Past the clock tower, past a café with its lights still on and someone moving behind the glass—the warm amber of it so aggressivelyhomethat I look away—past a hardware store and a bookshop and a pub that sounds lived in rather than rowdy. Past people on porches and people on foot and a dog sitting regally on the steps of what might be a church, judging every passing car with equal disdain.
Past the end of Main Street, where the cobblestones give way to regular asphalt, the buildings thin out, and the river appears again through a break in the trees, dark and glittering.
I should keep going. That’s the logical move. The smart move. A town this small is a trap of a different kind. There’s no anonymity, no crowd to dissolve into,everyone knows everyone and a strange woman in a beat-up car with out-of-state plates is the most interesting thing to happen all week. You don’t hide in a place like Sweetwater Valley. You getnoticed.The police might not come looking in a place like this, but someone could tattle to them.
My gas light comes on. I stare at it for a long moment. The audacity of the orange glow of it in the dimming interior, steady and unimpressed.
“Yeah,” I say out loud, to no one. “I know.”
