Chapter 144

Chapter 144


Smoke on the Highway

Dawn came in pieces—first a gray seep at the edges of the trees, then a thin bruise of pink, then the kind of pale that didn’t feel like light so much as the dark giving up. Beck and I left Eli’s station before the birds decided what to sing. He stood on the porch with his hand lifted at shoulder height, not quite a wave, more like a blessing; behind him the stove glow made a small, brave sun on the window. We turned onto the logging road, then the narrow county lane, and the forest fell in behind us like a curtain closing.

I tried to measure my breath with the rise and dip of the truck’s hood. It didn’t work. My chest kept skipping, catching, sprinting. The Saint Christopher at my throat was cool as a coin fresh from water. I pressed it to my skin and told myself to count fence posts, to trace the dark seams in the pavement with my eyes, to name the trees—pine, spruce, birch—like a spell.

Beck drove like the road was a fragile thing that could crack if he pushed too hard. He kept both hands low on the wheel, the way he did when he was thinking too many thoughts at once. The heater whispered at our knees. His flannel—Eli’s—still smelled faintly of woodsmoke and some clean, old soap. I caught it and felt almost safe, and then the thought of “almost” made my stomach pitch again.

“Drink,” he said softly, tapping the thermos lid where it rode in the cup holder.

“I’m okay,” I lied. I took a sip anyway. The mint was tired but still doing its job, like a kind nurse at the end of a long shift. Outside, fog braided over pastures, snagged in low stone walls, pooled in hollows like breath you could see. A farmhouse drifted by—one light in a square window, ghostly cows standing in a row like painted toys.

The radio was on low for company—a thread of static with some old ballad caught inside it. I didn’t really hear it until the ballad broke and the newscaster came in clean, the voice crisp with practiced gravity.

“…developing story out of New England this morning. Philanthropist and business leader Richard Dane issued a new statement regarding his missing fiancée, Isabella Clarke, last seen—”

The name knocked the air out of me. It’s strange, hearing your life spoken like it belongs to the weather.

Beck went still except for his hands. He didn’t turn the dial. He listened.

“Authorities are exploring all possibilities, including the potential that Ms. Clarke may be experiencing pregnancy-related mental health concerns. Mr. Dane expressed hope for her safe return and urged anyone with information to contact—”

I fumbled for the knob and turned it down, not off. The words were already inside. My heart sprinted into my throat and stayed there, pounding against my tongue.

“Pregnancy-related mental health,” I said. It sounded clinical, almost gentle. It was a knife wrapped in gauze.

“Spin,” Beck said, eyes on the road. His voice had gone quiet in that way people use when they don’t trust noise. “He’s telling the world you’re broken. That if you run, it’s not because of him.”

I felt myself splitting—one part furious, one part humiliated, one part very small. “People will believe him.”

“Some will,” he said. “The ones who liked him already. The ones who need their world tidy.”

The radio kept murmuring beneath the heater’s breath: Dane’s “devastation,” the “community’s concern,” the “generosity and grief” of a man who had apparently never fired a shot in his life. They used my old staff photo—grinning, hair glossy from too much heat, innocence I hadn’t even realized I was wearing like a sweater. I could see it in my head and felt sick at myself for ever having looked so easy to claim.

“Turn it off,” I said. “Please.”

He did, and the truck filled with the sound of tires worrying the road’s edges and the hollow tick of some small plastic thing rattling in the dash. The silence made it worse. The words still crawled under my skin without the distraction of music to herd them.

“What if we’re wrong,” I blurted. “What if this is the wrong thing to do. What if going north just… strings out the inevitable? We could—” I stopped. The word call sat on my tongue like a hot bead of lead.

“You call him,” Beck said, not angry, not gentle—true, “and you don’t get another chance to leave.”

I stared at the fog and the line where the fog ended. My hands had gone cold holding the Saint Christopher. I pressed them between my knees and tried not to imagine the ways a story could be pinned to your name without you ever touching the bulletin board.

A green sign whipped past: RIVER OVERLOOK 2 MILES.

“Pull off,” I said. “Please. I just… I need air.”

He glanced at me, then back at the road, and signaled even though there wasn’t another car in sight. Two miles turned to one and then to a small gravel turnoff with a rail fence and a view of the river unspooling through a cut in the land. We rolled in. The truck idled. I didn’t wait for him to come around—I opened my door and stepped out into air that smelled like wet stone and thawed earth.

The overlook had one picnic table scarred with initials and a trash barrel that had lost the fight with a raccoon. The river below moved with the calm of something that knows it will always go where it’s going. I wrapped my arms around myself and watched a hawk ride the first sloppy thermals of the day.

Beck came to stand beside me but didn’t touch me. “Talk to me,” he said. “Even if all you have are leftovers of thoughts.”

“They’re not thoughts,” I said. “They’re—” I opened one hand, palm up, as if the word might land there. “It’s noise. Panic. He says I’m sick and people will nod and press a hand to their hearts and bring him casseroles.”

He was quiet for a beat, then: “He’s rich, Iz. He doesn’t get casseroles. He gets lawyers.”

It made a broken laugh jump out of me anyway. It died quick. “If someone recognizes me—”

“We keep moving.”

“If a cop pulls us over—”

“We keep the window up and our answers short.”

“If the baby—” I stopped, because the fear had a shape I couldn’t say out loud yet. The techs at the hospital had said dehydration; the doctor had smiled and told me what to eat and what to avoid and to rest, please, to rest. But fear breeds a thousand what-ifs faster than any lab test can chase them down.

Beck turned, crowding the horizon out of my view until there was only him and sky. He cupped my face, thumbs warm at the corners of my jaw, and made me look at him. His eyes were wrecked and clear at the same time.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “You didn’t break. He broke the world around you and told you to be grateful.”

A hot, embarrassing tear slipped out. I was too tired to chase it. “Are we even doing the right thing?” I asked. It was small and true.

“All I know is I love you,” he said, and the words came out like he’d been holding them in his mouth for hours and they’d burned him. “I love you. I’ll keep you safe. However long it takes.”

My heart fluttered like a startled bird in its cage. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, but it felt like the first time I’d been able to stand still long enough to hear it hit me. He leaned in a fraction, giving me space to lean back or forward. I didn’t move, and that was answer enough. He kissed me—not the way men in danger kiss in movies, full of show and teeth—but soft and sure and shaking, like a person checking a pulse and finding it.

When he pulled back, his forehead stayed resting against mine. “Breathe with me,” he murmured, and for a while we did: in on four, out on six, standing in the kind of cold that makes every exhale look like proof.

A semi thundered past on the road behind us, rattling the fence and cracking the moment. We both jumped; his hands steadied my shoulders.

“We should keep moving,” he said.

I nodded. “Okay.”

We climbed back into the truck. The seats were still warm from our bodies. Beck wiped a crescent of condensation from the inside of the windshield with the heel of his hand, started the engine, and let the heater roll again. The radio sat quiet, the newscaster’s voice exiled to the air between towns. He pulled us out, gravel spitting, and eased onto the blacktop like we were merging into a river midstream.

For a while there was only the rhythm of the road and the small, domestic sounds a truck makes when it is tired but loyal. I leaned my head back and watched the pale ribbon of morning unspool ahead. My hand found my belly without my permission. I didn’t press. I just rested it there like an apology for all the running.

“We’ll find somewhere,” he said, not looking at me, not needing to. “We’ll work if we have to, hide if we have to, do both if that’s the trick. Eli’s friend in Moosehead. Or the Whites. Or the next ridge after that.”

“What if he finds us?” I asked.

“Then we get lost better,” he said. The corner of his mouth bent. “I’m very good at lost.”

It drew another ghost of a laugh out of me. The road shouldered up into a long, gentle rise and we climbed it. At the top, fog hung in the trees like old lace. Beck flicked on the lights even though it was daylight now, and the beams made tunnels in the white.

I closed my eyes and listened to the engine, to the wiper blades, to the small stutter my breath still had on the end of the exhale. I told the baby a quiet promise I couldn’t fully word: that we were going toward, not just away. That there would be a kitchen again, someday, with a window over a sink and a silly, faithful plant on the sill. That someone would knock politely, and no gun would ever answer.

My heart fluttered again, softer this time, as if it had found a rhythm in the truck’s hum. Beck’s knuckles brushed mine on the console, not even a full touch, just a question.

I slid my fingers over his and laced them, answer enough.

We drove into the fog until the world became only what our headlights could reach, and kept going.