Even Hoyt, to some degree. There was something really awful in him and he just tried to keep it covered. Deny it. Until it came leaping out.

“I’ll talk to you later,” I said and walked back over to my trailer. I stopped at Joan’s and knocked on the storm door. But no one answered. Maybe she was working tonight. I wasn’t even entirely sure what day it was. Sunday? Monday?

It hardly mattered.

It hardly mattered.

Perhaps it was my exhaustion. Perhaps it was finally telling my secrets to Dylan. Perhaps it was finally hearing the truth from Ben.

Or maybe under the shock I realized…I knew…what I had always known about myself, about Dylan, about life.

When we were pushed to the edge we were capable of anything. Surviving was the only thing that mattered.

I didn’t know exactly what had happened to Dylan. But he survived.

I stumbled to a stop in the middle of that dirt track between my trailer and Joan’s and pulled the phone out of my back pocket. Its weight and heft had grown so familiar. I liked the way it felt in my hand, how it centered me, in a way. Connected me, to a version of myself I wanted to be. To Dylan.

To the future.

Quickly, I texted:

I know about jail. I know what happened. It doesn’t change anything for me. It doesn’t change who you are. When this is done, when I am done…I’m going to come back to you. To hear the story from your lips. To finish what we started.

I bit my lip. Somehow, after all that had happened between us, now I felt the most brave. The most vulnerable. In this moment.

If you’ll have me.

DYLAN

“Dylan? Jesus. Earth to Dylan!”

Dylan jerked when Blake punched him in the shoulder.

“What? What the fuck?” Dylan snapped. There was a precision wrench in his hand, and he didn’t know what he was doing with it. The transmission in front of him was in pieces, but he could not for the life of him remember what he was doing. Was he putting it together or taking it apart?

Stop. Just stop. I’ve been bossed around, thrown into cars, driven to some kind of mountaintop fortress to…you. You, Dylan. You ended it and I still wound up here. To you!

Annie’s voice ran in a loop in his head.

She’d been inevitable, all along. From the moment she picked up that phone, every road led them to each other.

And now…now the roads were empty. And the work that had satisfied him, that had pulled him out of the shit of his past, away from the ghosts and the demons that haunted him, was stretched out in front of him and he did not care.

He was going to miss her for the rest of his life. Every minute she was gone, he was going to be eaten up by a kind of loneliness he’d never thought he’d feel again.

Not since Max. His parents. Those long, awful nights behind bars.

The kind of loneliness that came from the absence of one specific person.

But the jagged hole made by Annie’s leaving was sharper somehow, because for so long he’d mastered feeling as little as possible.

And he didn’t know if she was going to come back.

The rest of his life was going to feel this way.

He felt like he had after the accident. The fire. High on painkillers, staring down at his body like it was meat. Like he was somewhere buried inside of it, or floating above but not at all a part of it.

Not a part of anything.

“Get out of here,” Blake said. “You’re a fucking mess.”

He was. He was a fucking mess. He threw the wrench down and left the warehouse. His guys…Blake, they could do it all at this point. No one needed him.

I need you. Please, I need you.

He’d go down off this mountain to her. To make sure she was safe. That he hadn’t made a mistake letting her go down there alone with just her phone and the number of his lawyer.

But she’d insisted on going alone and he respected that.

Fuck.

His phone in his back pocket buzzed and he fished it out. His heart stopped when he saw it was a text from Annie.

I know about jail. I know what happened. It doesn’t change anything for me. It doesn’t change who you are. When this is done, when I am done…I’m going to come back to you. To hear the story from your lips. To finish what we started.

And then:

If you’ll have me.

Something like hope burned through him, igniting in his gut and blasting out through his fingers, the tips of his hair. And he landed squarely in his body again. Squarely inside himself.

And that hope-like thing crystallized into a happiness-like thing.

Part of him screamed out a warning, but he ignored it. He’d been living alone in his regrets for too long. He would not let Annie be another regret.

I do owe you a few more hours on your birthday wish, he texted back, but then erased it, because he didn’t need to try and make it seem like he wasn’t invested. Like he didn’t care.

Instead he wrote: Yes. I will always have you.

ANNIE

Yes. I will always have you.

I tucked my happiness, my glee, behind all my serious thick walls of worry. About my life. My future.

But that hope kept me lit up, and I felt like I glowed, like a lantern. The future was not entirely scary. Not entirely unsure. When the bad stuff was over, there was something good waiting for me.

Something amazing.

Dylan.

The door to my trailer was unlocked. I hadn’t had time last night to find my keys, much less lock up after myself.

Had it only been last night? Really?

How much time did it take for everything to change? I’d moved like a snail through my life before. So slow to know what I wanted. So slow to change. That was over now. I was changing with every breath I took.

I took the metal steps up into my trailer, set down my bag in front of the stove, and turned to shut the door. I slammed it hard the first time so it didn’t bounce.

“Hello, Annie.”

The voice stilled my blood. My lungs. The world swam around me. Instinctively I glanced back toward those captain chairs I never sat in, just to be sure that my exhausted, overwhelmed mind wasn’t playing tricks on me.

But there he was in his faded Wranglers and the dark short-sleeved shirt with the pearl snaps. His hat, sweat-stained and dusty, sat on the chair next to him.

Hoyt.

In my trailer.

The half second it took me to process what was happening was a half second too long, and by the time I was fumbling with the door trying to get it open, trying to get out, away, he was on me.

My arm was locked in his hand, his fingers pushing the nerves on its underside hard into the bone. Immediately my hand went numb. His other hand was so big that when it covered my mouth it partially covered my nose, too, and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t…breathe.

“Annie,” he whispered. That little smile on his face revealing the crooked eyetooth, the chipped incisor from his days in the rodeo. “Please don’t make this worse. I need…You need to be good,” he said. “And not scream. Can you do that for me? Be good for me?”

His breath smelled like coffee and Halls. He used to eat cough drops like candy, and the scent, familiar and nauseating, sent terror through me. My eyes rolled in my head and I strained away from him. I sank my teeth into the meat of his hand.