Without a thought, I swung Bray’s car door open and grabbed her by the arm, pulling her out faster than she could get out herself. The car coming toward us was so close. I pulled Bray against me and then pushed her around behind me. I looked up as the car neared.

“Don’t even think about it,” Anthony said, pointing the gun at me through the side window.

And just like with the last exit ramp, I watched as our last hope for help sped by at seventy miles per hour. Bray was shaking behind me, her fingers digging into my ribs.

“Thanks for the ride, man!” Anthony said just before he jumped behind the wheel and sped away with Cristina screaming curses at him from the backseat.

I watched until what were once my brake lights became tiny red dots in the distance and then blinked out.

“Son of a fucking bitch!” I punched at the air in front of me, wishing it was more than air. Then I turned to Bray. “Oh shit!”

She stood there trembling with her face buried in her hands.

I dropped the anger and became the comfort she needed. “Baby, come here.” I tried to pull her toward me.

“Leave me the fuck alone!” she roared, her hands falling straight down at her sides. She took several steps back farther into the grass. I followed. Tears shot from her eyes. “Just… just leave me alone.”

I knew she wasn’t mad at me. She just needed a moment. She’d just had a goddamn gun pointed at the back of her head.

She sat down on the grass, her hands shaking as if she were freezing. I crouched in front of her and rested my hands on the tops of her knees.

“What the fuck are we doing, Elias?” She looked up into my eyes, tears glistened on her cheeks in the bluish dark. “What the fuck are we doing here?”

I sat down fully and held her hands. “We can go home if that’s what you want, Bray, all you have to do is say the word.”

She shook her head no. She wasn’t sure of anything, just as I wasn’t. She asked me what we were doing here, but it was only a moment of realization. She knew that things were so much worse than getting robbed and left on the side of a freeway hundreds of miles away from home. I knew Anthony had little to do with what was going through her mind at that moment. He was just the messenger, a small and insignificant piece of a much larger picture that we were lucky enough to have forgotten all about for just a little while. This situation only brought back to reality the gravity of the bigger situation surrounding it.

“I don’t want to go back,” she said, raising her eyes. “I want to keep going. I just want to keep going.”

“Then that’s what we’re going to do,” I said.

I pulled her over into the throne of my lap and covered her with my arms.

“We have no car. No money. No phones. Fuck, we don’t even have any clothes!” She clutched my fingers, tangling them with hers. “We can’t call the cops. What are we going to do?”

“The beach isn’t far from here,” I said. “The exit we passed is probably about a ten-minute walk. We’ll go back the way we came and stop in at one of the gas stations there and I’ll call my father. I have money in the bank. I’ll have to risk that much at least. We can’t do this without money.”

She turned around halfway at the waist. “No,” she said. “We can’t get our families involved, you know that. They might already know by now why we ran. We can’t risk anything. I’m not going back.”

That look in her eyes told me she was terrified. Bray had been about as scared as one can be when I was with her back on that ridge. But this was a different kind of paralyzing fear. It was as if she had already made up her mind to believe that she was going to go to prison for Jana’s death, no matter what we did or how long we did it. I knew in this moment that I would never be able to talk her into turning back. She was going to run until things got worse, much worse, and until the day she died.

And like I vowed to her and to myself in the beginning, I was going to run with her. Because I fucking loved her. And love makes a person do crazy fucking things.

“I have an idea,” I said.

“What?” Her voice shuddered.

I got to my feet and took her hand, bringing her up with me.

“Come on,” I said and pulled her gently alongside me down the shoulder of the freeway.

We were exhausted by the time we got to the ocean nearly an hour later on foot. Neither one of us ever expected to be hiding out on a beach in Florida to get some sleep, hoping the cops didn’t shine their flashlights in our faces and run us off or haul us to jail.

“I don’t know if I like this,” Bray said, looking all around as we came upon the back of a beachfront hotel. “What if we get caught?”

“We won’t as long as we act like we belong here.”

The beach was empty at this hour, and the hotel was pretty much quiet except for a few of its guests sitting out on their balconies. Bray questioned me when we walked into the hotel and took the elevator up to the third floor and then came back down. I told her we needed a room number and she shrugged it off, not really understanding what for but accepting it. We passed by the pool and an outside shower, and we made our way down a wooden walkway and onto the beach. We lay down on the sand out in the wide open, and Bray curled up next to me.

Not ten minutes later a security officer found us and we got the damn flashlight in our eyes after all. “What are you doing out here?”

I raised myself up from the sand, partially shielding my eyes from the light.

“Just enjoying the ocean,” I said and then pointed at the hotel behind me. “We’re staying in room three forty. Vacationing from Missouri.”

He shone the light around the sand beside us.

“Where’s your room key?” he asked and I panicked a little inside.

I stood up and patted my cargo shorts back and front pretending to be searching for it and realizing it wasn’t there. Bray got up, too.

“Oh crap,” she said. “I probably dropped it by the pool. I’ll go look for it. Be right back.”

“Hurry up,” I called out to her, as she ran barefooted through the thick sand and back toward the hotel.

I had no idea how we were going to get out of this one. The only thing we could really do, I thought at that point, was run like hell. He was just a security guard, after all, and unlike a cop he probably wouldn’t care to chase us far. But I wanted to avoid a chase, even a short one, at all costs. We didn’t need any attention drawn to us. What we needed was a quiet night to ourselves so that we could think about what we were going to do next, because we had literally run out of options. We had nothing. No money. No car. Just the clothes on our backs and each other, and I was worried now more than ever about us being able to go any farther. Even if we got through this minor issue with the security guard, I still didn’t know how we were going to press on. I couldn’t tell Bray yet that I felt like we needed to go home. She was hell-bent on moving forward. She wouldn’t have accepted it. But I began to realize that something more was going on with Bray. Something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but it left me with a sense of deeper responsibility, as if she was incapable of being fully responsible for herself. I didn’t want to believe that. Bray was a smart and confident girl, but I started to feel like her reckless decisions no longer mirrored my own. They weren’t based on fear and natural worry, constantly licked by the voice of reason, like mine had been. Her reckless decisions began to seem fueled by something far more dangerous, something devoid of rationality.

I started to think that I was hurting her more than I was helping her, but I wasn’t yet sure what else to do.

I carried on with the security guard, trying to play off my tourist act as smoothly as possible while I waited on Bray. Though waiting on her for what, I didn’t know.