And now I'm living.
"Dom?" Roxy says, pulling me out of my thoughts.
"Yeah?"
"Come here."
I cross the room and stand behind her, looking at the screen. She's pulled up one of the photographs, the abandoned store, the one she was reviewing earlier. But the way she's edited it now shows that she has enhanced the shadows, sharpened the broken glass until it looks like teeth.
"What do you think?" she asks.
"It's great."
She leans back against me, and I wrap my arms around her, resting my chin on top of her head. We stay like that for a while, watching the image on the screen, and I think about how far we've come. From the dead fox on the Utah roadside to this moment. From strangers to something deeper, darker, more permanent.
We're not going back.
We're only going forward.
And wherever that leads, we'll face it together.
CHAPTER TEN
ROXY
The coffee tastes like rust and burnt plastic, but I drink it anyway. We're somewhere in Arizona now, at a rest stop off I-40 with vending machines that flicker and bathrooms that smell like piss and bleach. The sunny day is drawing to an end, the best part of the day.
Dom's been checking the mirrors for the last hour. Not obviously as he's too controlled for that, but I notice. The way his eyes flick to the rearview every thirty seconds. The way his jaw tightens when a car passes us going the opposite direction. The way he took three unnecessary exits in the last fifty miles, looping back onto the highway like he's testing something.
He thinks I don't see it, but I see everything. I’m as obsessed with him as he is with me.
"You want to tell me what's going on?" I ask, setting my bottle of water on the dashboard.
He doesn't look at me. "What do you mean?"
"You've been driving like we're being followed for the last two hours. You took that exit near Flagston for no reason. And you keep checking your phone like you're waiting for bad news."
"I'm being careful."
"You're being paranoid again."
"Same thing."
I study his profile, the stoic face, the tension in his body like he is ready to pounce at any given moment, the annoying way he taps his fingers against his thigh like it’s a sensory distraction. He's hiding something. Something that's making him more tense than usual, and that's saying a lot for someone who catalogs surveillance cameras like other people count sheep.
"Dom."
"Yeah?"
"Tell me."
He's quiet for a long moment, and I can feel the weight of whatever he's not saying pressing against the space between us. Finally, he pulls off at the next exit at another rest stop, this one even more desolate than the last. He shuts off the engine and sits there, staring straight ahead.
"There are cameras," he says finally.
"I know there are cameras. There are always cameras."
"Not like this.The small town, at the gas station where we dealt with Carl, they had cameras at multiple angles, and now there are witnesses."
