I told myself that if something bad was going to happen, it would have already. That danger didn’t wait politely while you ran errands and paid bills and pretended your life was fine. The river looked the same in daylight—wide and brown and harmless. The trees didn’t whisper secrets. The campground didn’t feel watched.
Everything looked normal. Which meant it probably was.
The rational part of my brain kept repeating the same loop:What would be the point?What possible reason would anyone have to come afterme? I didn’t own land. I didn’t have money. I didn’t have power. I was just a broke former hairdresser living in a leaky trailer, scraping by on freelance gigs and the last ofmy savings. If someone wanted to intimidate Aggie, they’d go straight to her. If they wanted leverage, they’d pick someone who actually factored into the equation. Not me. Not the girl who could barely afford to fix her own roof.
It didn’t make sense.
None of it made sense.
So why couldn’t I stop checking the locks three times before bed? Why did every creak of the trailer settling make my heart lurch into my throat? Why did I keep glancing at the window like something might be standing just outside the glass, waiting for me to look away?
Because logic didn’t stop fear. It only gave it room to hover around and freak you out.
I should talk to Matt. But nothing had actually happened, and I didn’t want to make him worry about me more than he already did.
I went back to my routines as if nothing had changed. I woke up early, made coffee in the half-working machine that coughed as if it resented me, and sat at the small table by the window scrolling through job listings with the quiet determination of someone who refused to panic. And I continued to work odd jobs while I ate through my savings.
I didn’t go live again. I recorded instead. I kept it to short, careful clips that I saved and unsaved twice before deciding I’d deal with them later. The mic sat on the table beside my laptop like it was judging me, waiting to see what I’d say next.
Levi stayed at a careful distance. We passed each other once outside Violet’s, exchanged a smile and a wave that felt polite enough to hurt, and kept going in opposite directions.
I told myself that was good. Space was good. Space meant I didn’t have to answer questions I wasn’t ready for.
What I didn’t tell myself, because I was trying very hard not to look at it directly, was that the distance cost mesomething too. That I’d thought about his invitation more times than I was comfortable admitting—not just once, lying awake that first night, but in the small, unguarded moments when I wasn’t managing myself carefully enough. Pouring coffee in the morning. Watching the river from the trailer steps in the grey early light. The way he’d saidI want my best friend back,like it was simple, like it was just a matter of me saying yes and everything finding its way back to where it used to be.
Like I hadn’t spent years quietly grieving the version of us that existed before everything got complicated. Before I knew what I knew about what he felt, before the parking lot, before the careful choreography we’d been performing ever since.
The smoothie. That was what kept surfacing, which was embarrassing. Such a small thing. He’d just bought me a smoothie and opened a car door and looked at me like I was worth being patient for, and something in me had gone very still and very frightened, because I recognized that feeling. The warmth of being seen by him. I’d spent a long time telling myself I didn’t miss it.
Turned out I’d been wrong about that.
But missing something and being ready for it were two entirely different things, and I wasn’t ready. I was barely holding the pieces of my own life together. I was sleeping in a trailer with a baseball bat beside my pillow and pepper spray on the nightstand. I was broke and jobless and freshly untangled from a relationship that had taken more from me than I’d admitted to anyone. The last thing I needed was to open a door I didn’t have the strength to close again if it went wrong.
Levi wasn’t the kind of man who went casually with anything. That was the problem. He had never been.
Still, every night when the campground quieted, and the river got loud, I lay awake longer than I used to, listening. Waiting.
Thinking about a smoothie cup cold in my hand and a car door closed like it mattered how gently.
And then my mother called. I almost didn’t answer. Then I felt guilty for almost not answering, so I picked up.
“Becca.” Nothi, honey, nothow are you—just my name, clipped and efficient, like she was already moving on to the next item on her list. Checking me off like usual.
“Hey, Mom.”
“I haven’t heard from you.” A statement, not a question. The implication underneath it, as always, was that this was something I had donetoher.
“I’ve been settling in,” I said. “Getting into a routine.”
“Still at the campground.” The pause that followed was not a neutral pause.
“It’s not a campground, it’s a?—”
“Matt said you could stay with him.” She said it the way she said most things—like she was judging my choices. “At least he has a house.”
“I know. I’m fine where I am.”
“He has a perfectly good guest room.” Another pause. “Your father and I would have you here, of course, but we’ve finally gotten the house the way we like it.” She said it lightly as if the fact that my life was falling apart was an inconvenience to her.
