I’d hung up and pointed the car west. Momma hadn’t included any rules about what to do when your soul was suffocating, but packing my entire life into my car and driving felt like one of those unspoken rules.
That had been three weeks ago.
I’d seen the Grand Canyon. The Badlands. A field of sunflowers in Kansas that had made me cry for reasons I still couldn’t explain. I’d slept in cheap motels and eaten gas station hot dogs and felt, for the first time in my adult life like maybe I was figuring out who I was.
Then my car broke down in Lone Mountain, Montana.
And I met him.
I’d broken three of my momma’s rules before noon.
By nightfall, I was sleeping in a stranger’s bed.
But that’s getting ahead of the story.
CHAPTER ONE
Roxie
The first clank was almost polite.
A little metallic cough from under the hood, like my car was clearing its throat before delivering bad news. I turned down the music—some pop song about freedom and open roads that felt a little too ironic—and waited.
Nothing.
“Okay. We’re fine. Just a—”
Clank. Clank. Clank.
The noise sounded like a bad rhythm section in a high school band.
“No. No, no, no. Come on, Scarlet. Not here. Not in the middle of—”
Montana apparently didn’t care about my protests. Neither did Scarlet, my little blue car who’d chosen this exact moment, on this exact stretch of empty highway, to stage a full mechanical rebellion.
I guided her onto the shoulder—-a generous term for the strip of gravel between the road and a whole lot of nothing. Trees. Mountains. Sky so big it made me feel like a speck.
“Scarlet. Please.”
The clanking continued.
I cut the engine dropped my forehead to the steering wheel and took a breath. Then another.
This was fine. This was totally fine. I had AAA. I had a credit card. I had—I pulled out my phone—one bar of service. That was enough.
“Okay. We’re good. We’re adapting.”
I googled mechanics nearme and got exactly one result. Lou’s Garage, Lone Mountain, Montana. Distance, three miles.
Lone Mountain. I hit the name of the town to see exactly which spot fate had landed me. I squinted at the facts listed in cheerful bright blue script. Home of the Lone Mountain Lumber company. A farmer’s market, and… Wait? Did that say the Mountain Mates App?
“Mmm,” I muttered to myself. I had actually heard about that.
Then came the long list of activities one could do while in town. Hiking. Rock Climbing. Boating.
“Okay, that’s a hard pass on all those,” I told no one. I was a curvy girl and that explained everything.
“Okay, Scarlet, you’ve got this. Just a few more miles, you’ve got that in you, don’t you girl?” I patted the dashboard and tried the key. She started up like she was fresh off the assembly line. “That’s my girl.”
