Noah had walked.
And not one person had come after him.
He slept in the truck that night by Miller’s Creek, wrapped in an army blanket that smelled faintly of gasoline and cedar. Rain tapped against the roof. The windshield fogged. Somewhere in the darkness, water rushed over stones, steady and cold.
He should have kept driving west until the road ran out.
But a week earlier, he’d lost the only steady construction job he’d had in two years when the company folded. Two days after that, his landlord in Eugene changed the locks. The truck was low on gas, his savings were almost gone, and Blackwood—the town he hated most in the world—was the only place left that still existed in his memory like a shape he could touch.
Continue on the next page:
