CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Joey sat with her back pressed into the puffy pink headboard of the bed where she’d be sleeping that night. Yes, she’d cried when the alert had gone out about fifteen minutes ago, because it meant she would not be able to get back to Grams and Gramps until tomorrow.
Trick-or-treaters had dried right on up, and it wasn’t even six p.m. yet. She sniffled, determined not to let her mother or grandmother know that staying here had caused her to cry.
Her phone rang, startling her, and Joey dropped it to her lap and then picked it right back up, for she had seen Adam’s name on the screen. She swallowed back her emotions as she swiped on the call.
“Hey,” she said as brightly and as bravely as she could. “What’s up?”
“Are you at your mom’s?” he asked in his no-nonsense managerial voice.
“Yes,” she said. “They closed all the roads, as I’m sure you’ve heard. They send out an alert to everyone within a fifty-mile radius.”
“I got the alert,” he said.
Her nose ran, and Joey had to sniff to pull it back.
“I’m actually really glad you’re there,” he said. “Because?—”
Joey sat up straighter, her heart pounding a little bit harder. “Because why?”
“I came up to Dog Valley to look at houses this afternoon,” he said. “And now I’m stuck here, sitting outside a locked house that has no furniture inside, even if I could get in. There are no hotels in Dog Valley. Did you know that?”
Joey smiled because for someone like Adam, the fact that no hotels existed in a place boggled his mind. “Yes,” she said. “I did know that.”
“Maybe your mom has an extra bed I can sleep in tonight,” he said.
All of the air left Joey’s lungs in one horrible rasping sound. “You want to come stay here?”
“Yes,” Adam said. “It’s pretty much my only option, which is shrinking by the minute, by the way, as I’m pretty sure my car is almost buried in snow, and I’ll be lucky to make it off this curb as it is. So I’m gonna need an answer pretty much right now.”
Joey jumped off her bed, her pulse pounding through herwhole body. “Let me go talk to my mom.” She muted the call and hurried down the hall.
“Mom,” she called. “I have a friend who’s stuck up here in Dog Valley. Can he stay here?”
“Of course,” her mom said. “I mean, we don’t have another bedroom, but he can sleep on the couch.”
The thought of Adam with his long legs and dignified personality sleeping on her mom’s ratty, lumpy couch somehow made Joey’s soul sing. “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell him.” She tapped to unmute the call and turned her back on her mother and grandmother. “She says you can stay here, but there’s no bed, Adam. It’s a couch.”
“A couch is better than my car that doesn’t have heat,” he clipped out. “Can you text me the address, like, right now?”
“Yes,” she said, her fingers flying to do that. “I’m doing it right now,” she yelled into the phone. “How far away do you think you are?”
“I don’t know,” he growled. “I don’t know where your mom’s house is.”
She sent the text with the address and watched as the circle moved around and around and around. It finally went through, and she shouted, “It sent.”
She tapped back over to the call and lifted the phone back to her ear. “I just sent it,” she said.
“I see it,” he said. “It looks like—” He trailed off, and Joey didn’t like the urgency in his voice. It sounded a lot like panic, and Adam didn’t live his life from that place. Joey didn’t know him very well, but she knew that much.
“I’m eight minutes away,” he said. “On a dry road. On these roads—I gotta be real honest, baby doll, I’ve never driven in the snow before.”
Joey’s breath left her lungs for the second time, but for an entirely different reason now. “You’ve never driven in the snow?” she asked. “Do you even have snow tires?”
“Are snow tires a real thing?” he asked.
