Only distant silhouettes now, dissolving into fog.
Once, they had been her shelter. Her prison. A history carved in ridgelines, long winters, humid summers. Silent roads that kept secrets better than people ever did.
Now, they were just something she was leaving behind.
Static crackled through the speakers. Then, soft and familiar, the first chords rang out.
“Almost heaven, West Virginia…”
She hadn’t touched the dial or searched for the song.
It found her anyway.
A quiet laugh pressed against her throat: ironic, maybe, or inevitable. She reached for the dial. But didn’t touch it.
“Take me home, Country Roads…”
The timing felt cruel. Or maybe perfect.
The road lay ahead, but her gaze stayed on the curve of mountains behind her, standing as they always had. Not guiding her. Not protecting her. Just there.
No longer towering. No longer inescapable. Just a jagged silhouette against the sky, growing fainter with every mile.
She hadn’t expected to feel anything. Not now. Not after all the goodbyes.
She whispered the next line under her breath, soft, off-key. A voice she hadn’t trusted in years, softening.
“To the place I belong…”
For the first time, the words didn’t ache.
They didn’t mock.
They simply existed.
A thread in the fabric of memory.
It wasn’t just a song. It was a tether to every backroad she’d ever driven, every night spent staring at the stars from the bed of an old truck, every unspoken dream she’d tucked beneath the weight of survival.
Her eyes flicked to the mirror again, watching the peaks blur into fog.
“West Virginia… Mountain Mama,” she murmured, this time without bitterness. Just remembering.
The final notes faded, and she reached down, turning the volume to silence.
Silence filled the car in its place: not hollow, just quiet. Stillness that wasn’t absence, but release.
?
The landscape shifted gradually: mountains flattening into hills, the hard lines of Appalachia softening without fanfare. Fences appeared. Fields. The kind of open space that made her feel like she was somewhere else, even if she wasn’t there yet.
And though she wouldn’t call herself sentimental, something in her chest stirred with every mile.
The morning light stretched golden across the hills.
White church spires broke the horizon like watchtowers.
Fields stretched wide beneath a pale sky, broken only by farmhouses and lonely steeples rising sharp against the horizon, silent promises written in stone.
