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Mud squelching in my hair.
Shackles around my wrists. The devil had hold of me. He’d never let me go.
Hands on my body.
I was being lifted.
My head hit something hard. A car roof? A shouted curse, Jeff’s voice, screamed into a screaming sky.
No one heard. No one cared.
My body tumbled onto something softer than ground. Leather in my nose.
I blinked against the muddle, trying to swim back to the surface. Swollen eyes, couldn’t open them.
Everything was spinning. Pain. It all hurt. I needed to throw up.
Drifting back down while hands on my legs shoved more of me wherever I was being shoved.
Back seat.
It was a back seat.
Wake up. Danger. I needed to wake—
The roaring howl outside was loud, louder, so loud.
I rolled against the back of the seat as the car started forward.
Car. I was in a car.
Jeff’s car.
He was driving away.
Away from the ranch. Away from Reece and Ruth, and—
I blinked again, against the pain of my swelling right eye, against all the pain. It was so loud, so loud I wanted to cover my ears.
Jeff was shouting curses.
Close my eyes, drift away, let him take me. Find a way to die later.
That would be easiest.
I couldn’t fight anymore. Nothing was left. I was too broken. I’d tried, I’d tried and look, look, here I was again.
Give in. Go to sleep. Fly away from the pain, from all of it. Give up, give in. You always do, you always will. There never really was any escape, you knew it all along.
But the sunsets.
The wind in my face and my hair as I rode the four-wheeler, day after day. Free.
Laughing at Bessie and Nine, at their joy and curiosity at simply being alive.
I’d been alive, too. Shining moments of life, flowing through me, the sky in my soul, expanding me.
The roar of a train thundered by outside the car.
