I turn around.
The unease starts before I’m back on Main Street, which I refuse to give credit to because I’ve been awake for going on thirty hours and my nervous system is running on fumes and unprocessed fury. It’s nothing. It’s road fatigue and hunger and the crawling alertness that sets in when you’ve been watching your side mirrors for three days straight.
It’s not the town. Except, it’ssomethingabout the town, something I can’t put a name to. A pressure in the air that wasn’t there before. It’s like being watched, but not the bad kind. Not the sharp-edged surveillance of someone looking for something. This is different. Layered.
Territorialis the word that surfaces, and I dismiss it immediately because it makes no sense.
I pull into the gas station at the edge of town, the one with two pumps and a hand-written sign that saysPAY INSIDE—ELSIE DOESN’T TRUSTTHE MACHINE ANYMORE.Something about that is so absurd and so homely that the coil of tension behind my sternum loosens a fraction.
Just a fraction.
I fill the tank. I pay inside with cash. Elsie, who is about seventy and has opinions about the weather and offers them freely, turns out to be the proprietor, the cashier, and apparently the self-appointed town greeter.
By the time I’ve bought a bottle of water and a packet of crackers I know about the carnival (the town’s been running it for sixty years), the café down the road (Tristan’s, the best pastries in the county, and Elsie is not being paid to say that), and the fact that the old Harrow place on the edge of town has rooms to let. Doris Harrow is a reasonable woman if you don’t make noise after ten, so I’m told.
“You passing through?” Elsie asks, not unkindly. Her eyes are sharp behind very round glasses, doing an inventory she’s pretending isn’t an inventory.
“Not sure yet,” I say. It’s the most honest thing I’ve said in four days.
She gives me a look that screams she has thoughts about that and has decided to keep them to herself. “The carnival opens soon. Town gets full fast. You want that room, you should decide tonight.”
I take my change and my crackers and I walk back out into the cooling air.
Here’s the thing about running. Everyone thinks it’s about fear. They imagine someone running scared.Hunched, desperate, always looking back. True victim energy. I’ve seen enough true crime shows to know the template they’re building for me right now: young woman, impulsive, brazen, criminal, fled the scene. The story writes itself, and it writes me small. Writes me as someone who broke under pressure and bolted.
Fled the scene.
I wasset up.There’s a difference, and it is the difference between who I am and who they’ve decided to put in the papers. Amber walked me through that bank like I was a co-conspirator and I had no idea—absolutely none—and by the time I understood what was happening my face was on three cameras and her voice was in my ear telling me torun, Lola, just runlike she was saving me, like she was the one looking out for me.
I have thought, in precise and minute detail, about what I will do to Amber when I find her. It keeps me warm on cold nights.
The point is: I am not running scared. I am runningstrategically. There is a difference, and the difference matters here too, because one of those versions of me collapses in a gas station bathroom and cries until she can’t breathe, and the other version gets back in the car, thinks three moves ahead, and chooses the next position deliberately.
I choose deliberately.
I observe the town.
Main Street with its insane cobblestones. The Ferriswheel skeleton against a sky that’s gone full dark now, the stars coming out twinkly and clear the way they only do far from city lights. The glow of the carnival stalls in progress. The lit window of the café across the road, and through it the silhouette of someone moving, easy and unhurried, the way people move when they’re in a space that belongs to them.
That pressure in the air again. That watched-not-watched feeling.
I breathe in. And there it is, that underneath smell, the layered living thing I noticed on the way in. It’s warmer now. More present. Like the town has a pulse and it’s just started to notice mine.
Thirty-six hours, I tell myself. Maybe forty-eight. Long enough to sleep in a real bed and eat something that requires a fork, and let the noise die down before I work out my next move. The framing is airtight right now because I don’t have anything to fight it with. There’s no evidence, no allies, no access to anything useful while I’m burning gas across state lines.
I need to stop moving long enough to think.
In Sweetwater Valley.Nobody looks for you in a place like this.
I pull out my phone—a new burner, bought for cash at a truck stop—and search for the Harrow place. The listing is ancient, clearly made by someone’s nephew, but the address is there.
I type the address into my maps.
Then I put the car in drive.
I’m not staying because I’m out of options. I’m not staying because I’m scared, or tired, or because some seventy-year-old gas station attendant gave me the eyes. I’m staying because I’ve looked at the board and this is the best position available, and I’m going to use it. When I’m done using it I’m going to leave on my own timeline, in my own way, with the next move already in motion.
Those are my terms.
