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Lara looked at her a long time.

“Take the blue truck,” she said. “Not your car. The blue truck’s got a full tank and a spare and Dean’s number on the visor. And text me from the pharmacy.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t ma’am me, I’m younger than you.” Lara put her head back. “Go on. Go. And Sunny.”

“What.”

“Thank you.”

The blue truck died at eleven o’clock, eleven miles out of Soluno, on a county road with no lights on it for forty miles in either direction.

It didn’t sputter. It didn’t warn her. She was doing sixty with the windows down and the prescription in a white paper bag on the seat beside her and the radio on the country station, singing, and the engine went quiet under her, and the lights went brown, and she coasted onto the shoulder with the wheel gone heavy and stopped.

Silence. Not town silence. The other kind, with nothing in it, not a cricket, not a truck, not a dog, and the sky full of more stars than she’d known there were and not one of them any use.

“Okay,” she said, out loud. “Okay.”

She turned the key. Nothing. She turned it again and got a click, and then not even that. She checked the fuel, which was three-quarters. She got her phone out, and it had one bar, and then it had none, and then it had one, and she typed truck died 11 mi out, ok, calling Dean to Lara and watched it not send.

She got out.

The hood was hot. She got it up and looked at an engine she didn’t understand in the light of a phone, and understood nothing, and put the hood down. The road went away flat in both directions under the stars. Somewhere a long way off there was one light, low, a yard light on a ranch she didn’t know, and it was the only thing in the world.

“Okay,” she said. “Right. Dean.”

She got back in the truck with the door open and one foot on the ground and held the phone up over the roof, the way people did in movies, and the bar came, and she called Dean’s number off the visor, and it called. Twice. And then it didn’t, and she was looking at a screen that said call failed, and then she was looking at the mirror.

Headlights.

Behind her. A long way back, coming up the road the way she’d come, high and white and slow, and then not slow, and she sat there with the phone in her hand and watched them get bigger in the mirror, and everything in her went cold and still and very clear.

She knew this. She knew the exact shape of this. A car coming up behind you at night, slowing, and the way your body decided before you did that this one was for you. Six weeks of it, in Indianapolis, and a gray sedan that had parked across the street from her building on a Tuesday and just sat there with its lights off, and her at the window with the phone in her hand and the police saying, kindly, that a man was allowed to park on a public street. She’d gotten over that. She’d driven two days and got over that, and here it was again, in Texas, on a road with nothing on it, and the lights were slowing down.

They stopped. Thirty feet behind her. High beams, full in the mirror, so she couldn’t see the truck or the driver or anything but light, and she sat there with her hand on the door and the phone dead in the other one and thought, very calmly, well, this is it, then, this is how it goes, and reached under the seat for the tire iron Dean kept there, because he was that kind of man, and got her hand around it.

A door opened. Boots on the gravel. A shape came up on her side out of the glare, a man’s shape, tall, hat, and stopped by her window with his hands where she could see them, both of them, open, held a little out from his sides.

“Sunny.”

She couldn’t see his face for the light behind him. She knew the voice. Every inch of her body had known that voice from the first word, and it took the rest of her about three more seconds to catch up, and in those three seconds she sat there with a tire iron in her hand and her heart going so hard she could hear it, looking at a shape in the headlights.

“It’s Brody. It’s me. Lara called. Your text came through and then it didn’t, and she couldn’t get you, so she called me.” He hadn’t moved. “I’m going to come around the front of the truck where you can see me. All right? I’m coming around now.”

He came around the front, slow, through the beams, so the light was on him and not behind him, and stood there by the hood with his hands still out, and it was him. Blue shirt. Hat. His face, with nothing on it, no grin, nothing, looking at her through the windshield.

She put the tire iron down on the seat.

He saw her do it. She saw him see it. And she saw him see the rest, too, whatever was on her face, because she hadn’t had time to put it away and she knew exactly what it looked like, she’d seen it in her own bathroom mirror at two in the morning in Indianapolis, and his own face did something and then stopped doing it.

He didn’t ask.

He came around to the window and leaned on the door and looked in at her, and said, in a plain voice, “What’d it do?”

“Died.” Her voice came out fine. It always did. “No warning. Lights went brown, and it stopped, and it won’t turn over. There’s fuel.”

“Alternator, probably. It’s done it before. Dean’s been meaning to.” He looked at the white bag on the seat. “That Lara’s?”