Ashley closed her eyes. She felt the hot tears before she could stop them. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, but she cried anyway. This pain came from deeper than any she’d ever felt. It wracked her, scraped her inside out, made her hollow and cold. Snakebite was the only place she’d ever known, and now she didn’t know it at all.
She was lost.
Tammy pulled Ashley’s head against her chest and ran a hand through her hair. They sat alone for what felt like hours, Ashley crying quietly and Tammy letting her.
“When is she leaving?” Tammy asked.
“Next week.”
“What do you want to do?”
Ashley sucked in a ragged breath. “I don’t know.”
Tammy ran a hand through her hair again. The horizon was cream-colored and light as a feather. It was the clearest the sky had been in months. The sun wasn’t blistering like before. Even if the sky was back to normal, even if Snakebite was settling down, Ashley couldn’t go back.
“Do you want to leave?”
Ashley sat up and wiped tears from her eyes. Tammy’s expression was genuine. Her eyes were clear and blue and pained. Ashley shook her head. “I can’t.”
“You’re eighteen,” Tammy said. “I can’t … I wouldn’t stop you.”
“The ranch…” Ashley trailed off.
“… will go on one way or another. It always does.”
Ashley’s heart raced. She’d spent years imagining a future, and it was always here. It was always in Snakebite, always on the ranch, always married with two kids and a dog, always quiet and predictable. Since all of this, she hadn’t imagined a future at all.
Now, she saw it. Sunset roads and forests she’d never seen. The truck rumbling under her, a soft hand folded in hers, dark eyes always watching.
“I don’t wanna leave you,” Ashley said.
Tammy smiled, bitter and soft at once. “You’re not. It’s not like you’ll never come back. It’s not like I’ll never see you.”
“Are you sure?”
“No,” Tammy said. She laughed under her breath. “It sounds like a horrible idea. But I know you, and you don’t want to stay here. You want to go with her. It’s not the first time this has happened to me. Or to people I love. Staying here would be worse, I think.”
Ashley nodded. She pulled her phone from her pocket and eyed Logan’s number. Tammy looked her in the eyes for a long moment, and then she smiled. She squeezed Ashley’s wrist once, then climbed out of the truck bed and made her way back to the Land Rover.
Only the quiet and the dead remained.
Ashley clicked Logan’s name and pressed the phone to her ear.
* * *
At the Bates Motel, the world was anything but quiet.
The door between rooms seven and eight was wide open, a warm breeze sifting between the two. Brandon leaned over the breakfast table, needling a map of the US with the sharp end of his pencil. Alejo shoved the last of his floral-patterned shirts into a duffel bag and hauled it to the minivan, humming a Johnny Cash song under his breath.
Logan sat on the bed. They casually moved through their morning, and Logan could almost pretend this was how they always were. A collection of three lost things that had cobbled together a life they could be happy in. A family.
“Gimme another thing,” Brandon said, tapping the eraser of his pencil against his glasses.
“Uh, how about America’s oldest cemetery?” Logan asked.
Brandon frowned and circled a spot on the map. “You can also pick fun places. America’s biggest mall. The tallest place you can drive to. The—”