Page 1
Chapter 1
Wrong Turns
The GPS rerouted for the first time just outside of Missoula.
Allison Hayes watched the little blue line on her phone screen dissolve and reform itself with cheerful indifference, pointing her down a highway she was fairly certain she hadn’t been on before, and told herself this was fine. She was adaptable. She was a person who handled unexpected things with grace. She had once reorganized an entire classroom during a fire drill and still made it back before the kids.
She could handle a GPS reroute.
In eight hundred feet, turn left, the GPS said.
She turned left.
The road became narrower.
* * *
She’d left Missoula at noon with a full tank of gas, a coffee from the drive through on Reserve Street that had cost her almost six dollars and been completely worth it, and a playlist she’d made specifically for this drive, something hopeful, something that said new chapter without being embarrassingly on the nose about it.
She’d made it through four songs before she called Becca.
“You’re already calling me,” her sister said, by way of greeting. “You’ve been driving for forty minutes.”
“The GPS is being weird.”
“The GPS is fine. You’re nervous.”
“The GPS,” Allison said, “told me to turn onto a road that I’m pretty sure is someone’s driveway.”
A pause. “Did you turn?”
“I turned.”
“Allison.”
“It recalculated! It seemed confident!”
She had found her way back to the highway eventually, no thanks to the GPS, which had spent the detour announcing recalculating in a tone she was starting to find personally offensive. The playlist had moved on without her. She turned it off somewhere past Evaro and drove in silence for a while, watching the landscape shift around her, the valley giving way to the first real suggestions of mountains, the trees getting taller and closer together, the sky narrowing incrementally overhead like something drawing in.
She’d stopped for gas and her second coffee at the Town Pump in Wye. The woman behind the counter had asked where she was headed and when Allison said Merrybrook the woman had tilted her head slightly, the way people do when they’re trying to place something.
“Merrybrook,” the woman repeated.
“Up north. In the mountains somewhere, I think. There’s a lake.”
“Hm.” The woman handed back her card. “Never heard of it.”
Allison had smiled like this was not unsettling and walked back to her car.
She’d called Becca again somewhere past Ravalli, when the highway started doing things she hadn’t expected, curving hard into tree cover, losing cell signal for ten minutes at a stretch, developing an alarming tendency to look like it was about to end and then continue anyway in a slightly different direction.
“I might be lost,” she said, when the call connected.
“You’re not lost. You have GPS.”
“The GPS is rerouting again. This is the third time. It just told me I’ve reached a road not supported by this application.”
“What does that mean?”
