She'd reserved a room at a small bed and breakfast under a false name Sarah Wells and paid in cash she'd gotten from an ATM 2 days before to avoid any digital trail. That part she was almost proud of. That part felt like the beginning of something. What she had not told herself clearly because she hadn't been ready to say it out loud was the other part of the plan. The car the old Honda ran fine.
Victoria knew that. She'd had it serviced 2 months ago. But at some point, maybe 20 m outside of the town of Mil Haven, Georgia, she was going to pull that car to the side of the road. She was going to pop the hood and she was going to wait. She told herself it wasn't pathetic.
She told herself she'd read enough behavioral research to know that vulnerability was the fastest route to authentic human connection. She'd underlined that in a book once. She believed in data. She told herself a lot of things. She stopped for gas at a station just past midnight somewhere in middle Georgia.
Fluorescent lights humming, bugs circling the bulbs. A teenage boy working the register who looked up from his phone long enough to nod at her. She paid cash, got a bottle of water and a pack of peanut butter crackers that she ate in the parking lot leaning against her car because she'd left the gala before the dinner service and hadn't eaten since noon. She stood there in the thick Georgia night in the dress she'd had on at the Saint Regis 4 hours ago, her heels traded for the old sniss she'd grabbed from the bottom of her closet. Eating crackers under a gas station light, she thought, "This is what's become of you. " And then she thought, "No, this is what you're trying to become.
There was a difference. " She was holding on to that. She got back in the car and kept driving. The sun was beginning to suggest itself at the edge of the sky, not rising yet, just hinting when Victoria turned onto a county road about 6 milesi outside Mil Haven. Two lanes, trees on both sides growing close enough that the branches formed a canopy overhead. The kind of road where the asphalt was old and patched, and you drove it slow because you never quite knew what was around the next curve.
She pulled off onto the gravel shoulder. She cut the engine. She sat there for a moment. And the silence was the kind of silence she had forgotten existed. The kind kind that wasn't just an absence of noise, but a presence of something else.
Crickets, a distant bird, the ticking of the cooling engine. She got out of the car. She lifted the hood. She propped it up with the rod. She stood back and looked at the perfectly functioning engine of her perfectly functional car and felt the full weight of what she was doing.
"Okay," she said out loud to no one. "Okay," she didn't have to wait long. 20 minutes, maybe. She'd sat on the front bumper and watched the sky shift from gray to pale gold. And she'd thought about absolutely nothing, which was something she almost never allowed herself to do.
And it had been both peaceful and terrifying. She heard the truck before she saw it. A low rumble diesel engine, something older. It came around the curve behind her. And before she'd even looked up, whoever was driving had seen the raised hood and started breaking automatically.
The way you do when you've been raised to stop for people who need help. The truck pulled up behind her. Dark blue. Maybe once faded now. Work truck.