Page 2 of Open Road

The dog tags shift against my sternum. I don’t reach for it. Old habit, touching it when things go sideways, but I broke that habityears ago. Things only go sideways if you let yourself care which direction they’re pointing. I learned that early and hard, and it has served me well for a long time.

The road doesn’t ask anything of you except that you stay on it.

I can do that.

I’ve been doing it my whole life.

The bike eats another mile, the night thinning slightly at the edges in a way that says dawn is a rumor somewhere out east over the Atlantic. I won’t see it. I’ll be back at the compound before first light, engine cooling in the yard, boots off at the door out of a habit so old I couldn’t tell you when it started.

Tomorrow there’ll be another job, or there won’t. Either way, the road will be here and I’ll be gone.

Somewhere north of Gainesville, where the highway stretches so flat and long it seems to reach the end of something, I catch the orange pulse of hazard lights on the shoulder ahead.

I almost don’t slow.

The road is full of other people’s problems, and I have never made a habit of collecting them. My thumb doesn’t even move on the throttle. I watch the lights approach, a car, pulled over tight to the shoulder, hood not quite flush, and a woman standing at the front of it, her hair falling forward on one side of her face.

I pass her.

I get maybe two hundred yards up the road.

I don’t know what it is—the hour, the emptiness of the highway in both directions, the way she was standing there, not flagging anyone down, not on her phone, simply standing like someone who has learnednotto ask for help.

I ease off the throttle.

And turn around.

That’s what I do.

Chapter One

JANIE

Five hours in, and the gas gauge is lying to me.

It has to be.

The tank was filled in Ocala two hours ago, topped right off, while Rose slept in the back, and I stood at the pump, watching every set of headlights that turned in. The gauge is sitting a quarter lower than it should be, adding to the list of things wrong with Craig’s car. The list is long. His backup, the one he keeps in the garage for what he calls‘incidentals,’which means I’ve never driven it and don’t know its quirks. My car I know. The way my Civic pulls slightly left, the way the air conditioner takes three minutes to cool in summer. I know nothing about this car except that it was available at two in the morning when I needed it most.

I don’t let myself think about what‘incidentals’cost me.

The radio stays off.

That one is easy to figure out.

Craig has trackers on everything, including both our regular cars and my phone, which I smashed in the driveway under the heel of my boot and felt something close to joy about. This car is different—it’s his backup, the one that sits in the garage for months at a time, the one neither of us drives unless something else is in the shop. He may never have thought it worth tracking. Well, that’s the gamble I’m taking. Four years of living with Craig teach you that assumption keeps you safer than trust, and right now, I’m assuming this car slipped through the cracks of his need for control.

I took the long way for the same reason, west on I-10, then north on I-75 through Ocala, the route Craig wouldn’t expectfrom a woman heading for Georgia. He’d assume I-95 north. The obvious road, the fast road. So I took the other one.

The interstate is quiet. Me, the hum of the engine, the occasional semi pushing north with its running lights glowing amber in the dark. Rose is in the back seat in her car seat, one arm around Mr. Rabbit, her head tipped sideways at the angle that always makes my neck ache in sympathy. She fell asleep outside of Tampa, mid-sentence, the way small children do, one moment seriously explaining to me that Mr. Rabbit preferred the window seat, then nothing. Out. Gone somewhere safe inside her own head.

I envy her for that.

I keep my eyes on the road.

Valdosta is four hours north, and Aunt Patty has no idea I’m coming. I couldn’t risk calling ahead and leaving a digital trail Craig might find before I was gone, so I’m counting on the fact that when I show up on her doorstep, she’ll open the door. Patty is my mother’s younger sister, the one who sent me a birthday card every year, even after Craig made it clear her calls weren’t welcome. She’ll take one look at my face, and she won’t ask questions I’m not ready to answer.

At least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself for two hundred and eighty miles.