Viv:
I didn’t know how quiet could be so loud.
Not until we made it here.
The town didn’t even have a name on the sign—just a faded, sun-warped board with the words Population 312 scrawled under a rusting bullet hole. The kind of place where the gas station was also the grocery, the post office, and probably the bar. We parked at the edge of it all, and somehow, it felt like we’d dropped off the map entirely.
That was the point.
We weren’t hiding—we were gone. Ghosted.
The motel Knox found us wasn’t fancy, but the air conditioner worked better than it looked, and the water didn’t run brown. No mold on the ceiling. No blood in the carpet. That felt like luxury.
I woke to the sound of desert wind instead of engines or screams. I blinked the sleep from my eyes, the sheets tangled aroun
