The Ford pulls out, and the first thing I do is tug the cuff of Spur's flannel shirt down over the gauze on my wrist.
I'm wearing his shirt over my own tank top. Jeans. Boots.
The hat my mother bought me the summer I turned twenty-one is on the seat between us.
Spur drives one-handed, his right hand on the gearshift, his left hand on the wheel.
Rogue is in the back seat with his laptop already open, the screen tilted away from the windshield so the glow doesn't catch on the glass.
The hill country is dark for the first hour.
Spur doesn't talk.
He hasn't talked since we pulled away from the main house, and I know it's not him being cold. It's him being focused.
He drives the way he tattoos. The same calluses on the same hands, the same steady. He'll talk when he's ready.
I look at the dark road outside the passenger window and let him drive.
Somewhere west of San Saba, the sky starts coming up gray. Then orange. Then the kind of pink the hill country goes when the sun's about to clear the eastern ridges.
Spur drives into it without sunglasses on, his jaw set, his hand still on the gearshift between us.
Rogue speaks once from the back. "I cloned the line at the gate. Anything that comes in while we're on the road, I see it before either of you do."
"Yeah," Spur says.
I look at my phone in my lap. No messages.
The unknown number has been quiet since the photo the other day, and the quiet is its own kind of sound.
I tug the cuff over the gauze again.
Spur sees me do it.
He reaches across the console without looking at me and takes my right hand in his—not the marked one, the other one—and holds it on top of my thigh for a long stretch of road. His thumb moves slowly across my knuckles.
He doesn't talk.
I let him have it.
Around mile two hundred I work up the words. "Spur."
"Yeah? How's your wrist holding up under that gauze, baby?"
It takes me a second to realize he's asking after me and not the other way around. "It's fine."
"Sore?"
"A little."
"Tell me if it gets worse."
"I will."
He squeezes my hand once and lets go to shift gears.
* * *
