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“I know what he did.”
“I know you know. I just want you to remember it when you’re scared. Because what you’re doing right now, driving toward something unknown because something in you said go, that’s the opposite of what you were doing with Ryan. That’s you choosing yourself. And that matters.”
Allison was quiet.
Ryan, who had called her at ten on a Tuesday when he’d had a bad day, who had stopped calling when his days got better. Ryan, who had looked at her across a restaurant table five months ago and said I just don’t think I’m in love with you in a tone that suggested he was surprised she’d expected otherwise, like she’d misread the terms of a contract she’d never actually been shown.
She had spent two years being available. Being steady. Being the person he called when his ex-girlfriend posted something that upset him, when his boss was unreasonable, when the apartment felt too quiet.
She had not spent two years being chosen.
There was, she had come to understand, a difference.
“I know it matters,” she said. “I just wish knowing it felt better.”
“It will,” Becca said. “Give it time.” A pause. “You know I’m proud of you.”
“You cried.”
“I cried because I was proud of you. There’s a difference.” Another pause. “How far out are you?”
Allison looked at the GPS. It had, in the last few minutes, stopped rerouting and gone quiet in a way that felt less like confidence and more like resignation. The blue line pointed north along the highway with what she could only describe as a lack of enthusiasm.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The GPS has gone ominously silent.”
“That’s probably good.”
“That’s not probably good, Becca, that’s...”
Recalculating, the GPS announced.
“Oh come on,” Allison said.
Becca laughed.
“It’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“I’m in the middle of...” She gestured at the windshield, at the mountains, at the highway that kept curving into more highway with no visible destination. “There’s nothing out here. I passed a barn twenty minutes ago and that’s it. What if I run out of gas? What if the car, what if the knock is actually something serious and I break down out here and there’s no cell service and...”
“Allison.”
“...nobody finds me for three days and they write one of those news stories about a woman who disappeared trying to move to a town nobody’s heard of...”
“Allison.”
“...and the headline is something like Local Teacher Vanishes En Route to Possibly Fictional Montana Town...”
“Allison.” Becca’s voice, firm and warm and familiar. “Breathe.”
She breathed.
The highway kept going. The mountains kept rising. The trees kept filtering the light into something gold and green and completely indifferent to her anxiety.
“I applied to eleven jobs,” Allison said, after a moment. Her voice was steadier. “Did I tell you that? Kalispell, Bozeman, Helena, Billings, Missoula. All cities. Safe choices. Places with Target stores and coffee shops on every corner and enough people that you could disappear a little if you needed to.”
“And Merrybrook.”
