Page 74 of Where Roads Lead

Without a word, she climbed in beside her.

Chapter Twenty

Elsie

Sometimes, I lamented being an only child.

There were good parts, sure. Namely, having all of your parents’ attention all the time.

And there were bad parts, like having all of your parents’ attention all the time.

It could get incredibly lonely, but even that had an upside. It was the catalyst for some of my best stories. Nothing broadens the walls of your imagination quite like loneliness.

So, even though I sometimes wished there was someone growing up beside me to share the uniquely traumatizing experience of growing up with my specific set of parents, I decided once and for all that night that I was glad to be an only child after all.

Family dynamics were just too complicated to add any more members to the mix.

The epiphany struck me somewhere around the time the stifling tension radiating between Will and Ava reached its limit—at least by my own personal estimate.

“Can we put on music?” I finally blurted out, sounding a bit more frantic than I’d intended. “The silence in here is driving me crazy.”

Will turned his head, cocking a brow at my outburst.

“We’ve been driving for one minute, Elsie.”

I stared at the clock on his dashboard to see he was right, though I would’ve sworn it had been at least ten hours.

Ava was staring out the window, an eerie silence that seemed less contemplative and more of a, I’m plotting your demise kind of quiet.

Which I didn’t really understand, considering I thought we’d patched up our differences over the shared trauma of babysitting and, you know, nearly burning someone’s house down.

Guess Ava would be a tougher cookie to crack.

Ooh, bad pun, Elsie.

“Why are you laughing to yourself?” Will asked.

“Sometimes I have dark humor,” I admitted, clearing my throat. “Sorry.”

“Where are you going?” Ava interrupted, turning to stare across me toward Will.

“Bringing you home?”

“You skipped Elsie’s street,” she said, visibly annoyed.

“He did?” I asked, staring lamentably at the dark streets passing by, all completely unrecognizable to me. “I mean, he did.” I nodded confidently, not wanting to prove him right about my lack of navigational skills.

His head was big enough as it was.

“Why are you going out of your way to drop me off first?” she asked, refusing to drop it.

Will’s eyes stayed glued to the road.

“It just makes more sense, so she doesn’t have to crawl over you to get out.”

That seemed valid enough to me. And it was better than my theory that he just forgot he needed to drop me off too.

He was probably on auto-pilot and navigating to Ava’s house was a lot more second nature to him than driving to mine was.