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“Please come back soon,” she said, her voice full of tears. He found them in her eyes when he stepped back.
“I will,” he promised, though if it were truly up to him, he’d never come back to Austin again. “I’m gonna go say goodbye to Daddy.” He practically jogged through the house to the back yard, where he said all of his goodbyes with a few words and a wave before he hugged his father.
“Thank you for feeding us so well,” he said. “I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you too, son.”
Slate stood in his dad’s arms, soaking in those words, for as long as he dared. Then he stepped back, nodded, and went back out front. He hugged his sister and got in the back seat of the truck. “Drive, please,” he said, his voice quiet but deadly.
Luke backed out of the driveway and got the truck headed away from Slate’s childhood home. With every mile that passed, another memory got tucked away behind the closed door in Slate’s mind. The problem was, he didn’t think he could contain them all before they returned to the ranch. There wasn’t enough miles for that.
“Okay,” Luke said twenty minutes later. “We’re officially out of the city. Tell us what happened back there.”
Slate stared out the window, not focused on anything. “I was getting the water when the doorbell rang,” he said, his tone flat now. “It was someone I knew from…back then. He somehow got inside the house. He was asking all these questions.” Slate pressed both palms to his eyes. Images of who he’d been flashed through his mind’s eye, and he wanted to pluck them all out by the root and rid himself of them completely.
How can I get rid of this?he begged to know.
“I’m not that man anymore.”
“Of course you’re not,” Dallas said, but Slate hadn’t realized he’d even spoken out loud.
“You came back,” Luke said. “You’re clean.”
“He followed me to this gas station and taunted me with my wallet. He’d taken pictures of all of my cards, my ID, everything.” Pure exhaustion came over him. He just wanted to be in the big bed in the roomy bedroom in the Annex. It would be cool and dark, and he could get Axle to curl up at his side. The two of them would breathe together, and there would be no threat of past mistakes threatening to pull him under dark water again.
“I erased them all,” he said. “And came back.”
“We do need gas,” Luke said.
“Pull over in the next town,” Dallas said. “I’ll pay.”
“I can pay,” Slate said. “I got my wallet and all the cards back.”
“Did you empty the trash on his phone?” Dallas asked, turning around to look at Slate. He met his friend’s eyes, pure dread filling his chest with lead bricks.
“No,” he said.
“Then he’ll still have those pictures,” Dallas said. “You better start calling and canceling them right now.”
Another round of fury burned through Slate, but he simply clenched his teeth and nodded his head. Then he pulled out his phone and his wallet and started making calls to protect himself.
Halfway through the second one, his phone rang, and Jill’s name sat on the screen. He swiped it to voicemail, finished his call, and frowned. “Jill called. She knew I wasn’t going to be back until seven or eight.” They weren’t that far behind schedule. In fact, they’d left a few minutes early, because Slate couldn’t stand to be in Austin for another moment.
“Oh, uh, I called her,” Luke said, meeting Slate’s eye in the rearview mirror. “I thought maybe you’d called her or something…”
“Great,” Slate said with a sigh. Anything he’d been hoping to hide about his trip to Austin would be impossible now. She’d want to know everything from what had happened to how he’d felt about it—and why he’d run from his parents’ house without a phone or a wallet or telling anyone where he was going.
His phone rang again. Jill for a second time.
“Just great.”
