Page 114 of What Remains

She'd learned to walk on this worn wooden floor, learned to ride in the pasture beyond these walls. She'd spent countless evenings helping her father muck stalls while her mother laughed from the doorway because the two of them had somehow gotten dirt absolutely everywhere.

She leaned against a stall, the rough wood pressing into her back as she fought to catch her breath.

She reached the old tack room before finally stopping. Her father's hat still hung on the peg by the door, and one of his old work gloves rested on the shelf beneath it, exactly where he'd left it. Liz hadn't moved a thing.

Her fingers hesitated for a moment before she picked up the glove. The leather had stiffened with age, permanently molded to the shape of the hand that had worn it for so many years, and she pressed it against her chest.

"So much gone..."

The whisper echoed through the empty barn.

First her parents. Then Mark. And now, another goodbye. She sank onto an old bale of hay, the thought catching her off guard. It wasn't just about Seth—she'd known him for what, a week? It was the finality of it, the last in a long line of farewells that had chipped away at her. His leaving hadn't just created a new hurt; it had torn the lid off all the old ones.

A harsh laugh escaped her, catching on a sob. "This is ridiculous." She swiped at her eyes. "You were supposed to leave. You were always supposed to leave."

That had been the deal from the beginning—get her home, keep Layla safe, then continue east. She'd known it. He'd known it. They'd both understood the arrangement from the very first mile.

So why did his leaving leave her somehow smaller, as if she'd handed him something through the window of that truck without meaning to?

Fresh tears slipped free, and she buried her face in her hands.

"I can't keep doing this," she rasped, the words splintering under the weight of her accumulated burdens. "I can't keep saying goodbye."

As a doctor, she had pronounced death, understood its clinical finality. Yet, she could still feel the rough cotton sheet against Mark's stillborn skin. Her training screamed protocols, but all she heard was silence as she closed their bedroom door for the last time.

She'd been wrong.

Grief, in its cruelest lesson, taught her that losing someone didn't always require death. Sometimes, it only required standing on a porch, watching taillights vanish down a snow-covered road.

Outside, Layla's faint laughter drifted across the yard.

Josie closed her eyes, letting the sound anchor her, clinging to that small, bright noise with everything she had left. It reminded her why she needed to stand, square her shoulders, and keep going.

Even though her heart yearned to remain on the barn floor.

The mountains gradually gave way to open highway, winding through snow-covered valleys and abandoned towns, frozen in time. Occasionally, he passed a wrecked vehicle or the skeletal remains of someone who never made it home, but mostly, the world had settled into an eerie stillness stretching from horizon to horizon.

The radio was silent, offering no distraction from the miles ahead.

His thoughts drifted back to the ranch—to Layla's tiny arms wrapped around his waist, to Liz's helpless laughter as a goat escaped its pen for the third time that afternoon.

To Josie.

He could still summon the warmth of her hand intertwined with his beneath the quilts that final night, the way she'd rested her forehead against his while neither spoke, because there simply hadn't been anything left worth saying. They'd both believed it to be goodbye.

He hoped she hadn't cried after he'd left. He hoped she'd been angry instead. Anger sat lighter on the shoulders, easier to carry through the long days ahead.

The afternoon faded into evening as heavy clouds rolled across the sky. The temperature dropped quickly, and the road turned slick beneath a thin layer of fresh snow. Seth eased off the accelerator. He had no intention of pushing unfamiliar roads in the dark—not alone, not when exhaustion could get a man killed faster out here than any of the dead.

A weathered gas station appeared around the next bend, its faded sign leaning at an angle, several letters missing from the old logo. The pumps had long since been stripped clean, and the convenience store windows stood boarded over from the inside. More useful to him, though, was the sea of abandoned vehicles surrounding it—cars packed bumper to bumper across the parking lot and spilling onto the highway shoulder, left exactly where panicked drivers had run out of gas and options months earlier.

He eased Beast between two rusting pickups until the SUV all but vanished among them. Perfect. Anyone passing by would see one more abandoned vehicle in a graveyard of hundreds, not a survivor bedded down for the night.

He killed the engine and let the silence settle around him. For several minutes he simply listened—the wind, the soft ticking of Beast's cooling engine, and nothing else. Satisfied, he climbed out with his rifle slung across his chest and wove a careful path through the maze of vehicles.

Most had already been picked clean. Doors hung open, and suitcases lay scattered across the pavement, their contents long since ruined by snow and rain. One family sedan still had a pair of children's snow boots on the back seat, Velcro straps undone, sized for maybe a four-year-old.

Seth looked away and kept moving.