Page 3 of Open Road

The car shudders.

It’s subtle. A tremor through the steering wheel, gone before I can properly register it. I tighten my hands on the wheel, keep my speed steady, and watch the gauges.

Everything looks normal.

Maybe a rut in the road.

Maybe nothing.

But then it does it again.

This time there’s a sound with it, something low and intermittent, a cough from somewhere under the hood. I knowenough about cars to know that sound isnotnothing. I know enough to know I’m south of Gainesville with a sleeping three-year-old and an emergency bag in the trunk, running from a man who has friends in the kind of places that don’t appear on maps.

The car coughs again. Harder.

I ease off the gas. The engine responds by doing it a third time, a stutter that shakes the whole car.

Rose stirs in the backseat. “Mama?”

“It’s okay, baby.” My voice comes out steady, and I’m proud of that. “We need to stop for a minute.”

I pull onto the shoulder and, without thinking, put on the hazards before the car has fully stopped. Muscle memory from every roadside drill my dad put me through back on the farm—pull right, stay visible, stay calm, park.

The engine ticks.

Then it stops.

I sit for a moment with both hands on the wheel. The hazards tick in the silence, orange light pulsing across the dashboard in a slow, patient rhythm. Outside, the Florida night presses against the windows, warm and thick, the smell of something green reaching me even through the glass. There’s palmetto scrub on both sides and a strip of star-scattered sky above, and no other cars.

I do not cry.

I made myself a promise at the end of the driveway back in Jacksonville, right after putting the bag in the trunk, buckling Rose in, and standing in the dark with my heart beating so hard I could feel it in my back teeth that there would be no crying in front of Rose. Whatever happens, she doesn’t see me fall apart. She has seen enough things she shouldn’t have seen. She willnotsee this.

I get out of the car.

The night air is warm on my arms. I go to the hood, find the release, and prop it open. The engine sits there in the dark, looking back at me like it has nothing to say for itself. The phone flashlight feels like lighting a flare, and here I am on the side of a highway at three in the morning, but I use it anyway. No choice.

I’m not a mechanic. I can check oil, change a tire, and jump a battery, but beyond that, my knowledge gets thin fast. I peer at the engine as if I can intimidate it into explaining itself. Oil looks okay. Nothing visibly broken or disconnected. Nothing on fire.

That last one feels like a low bar, but I’m taking my wins where I can find them tonight.

I lower the hood.

Leaning against the front of the car, looking up at the sky, I think very clearly and without any particular emotion. This is bad.

Not catastrophic or the worst thing that’s happened to me in the last four years, still it’s bad.

Aunt Patty doesn’t have a cell phone. At seventy-one, she considers them an imposition, which means I can’t call her. A tow truck, a cab, a dozen options that all involve using my phone to generate a location and give Craig exactly what he needs to find us before we’re safe. I can—

A single headlight appears in the distance behind me, coming from the south. One light means a motorcycle. My whole body goes tight as I push off the hood and get back to the passenger door, putting the car between me and the road, an old habit from a life that made it necessary. The hazards keep their patient orange pulse.

The bike doesn’t slow down.

It passes me at a steady speed, close enough that the car shakes with the displaced air, and I watch the single taillight shrink northward into the dark.

I let out a breath.

Then the taillight slows.