Page 17 of Smoke and Roses

“Not me.”

His tone is gentle, but direct when he asks, “Why not you?”

“Because you don’t know Carol Hayes,” I say, and it comes out sharper than I mean it to. “She hasn’t wanted to see my face in seventeen years. She’ll shut the door on me.”

He doesn’t flinch. He just looks at me, eyes moving back and forth as he studies my face.

“I don’t know her,” he says. “I know you a little. You won’t sleep tonight if you don’t go.”

Closing my eyes, I growl. “I never sleep any damned way.”

I cringe. “Sorry. That came out snippy.”

“You can be snippy.”

“No, I can’t. That’s not how this works.” I open my eyes. “You don’t get to just take it, Travis. You tell me when I’m being a jerk.”

He almost smiles. “Noted,” he says.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He stands up and picks up his keys. “I’ll drive you and I’ll stay in the truck.”

Carol Hayes lives in the same yellow house on Chapel Street she’s lived in all my life. The porch light is on. The flowerbeds are full of dead marigolds nobody’s pulled.

I knock with my heart in my throat. It takes her a long time to answer.

She looks older than I remember. Her hair is all gray now. She looks at me with her mouth tight, her eyes hard.

“Lindsey,” she says.

“Hi, Carol. Can I come in? There’s something else about Danielle. They found a bus ticket to Portland. For the morning after she⁠—”

“I know about Portland. I’ve always known about it. She talked about it every day. That’s how I know she left me. She left, and she didn’t even leave a note.”

“Carol, I don’t think she⁠—”

She snaps at me. “Go home, Lindsey.”

The door closes in my face.

Well. I take a step back, still stinging from her harsh response. Somehow I manage to walk back down to the curb without screaming.

Travis’s truck is idling with the lights off, solid and patient like the man, waiting for me.

I climb in and he doesn’t say a word, just reaches over and turns the heater up.

It feels like I’ve been punched as he pulls away from the curb. I barely notice that instead of turning toward Main Street, he turns toward Huntsville.

“Where are we going?”

He glances at me, then back toward the road. “When’s the last time you ate?”

I think about it. “There was a granola bar.”

“When?”

“Yesterday?” I scratch my temple. “I think yesterday.”