Jesse had been gone for three weeks when the postcard arrived.
Maya found it tucked under the door of the shop, the edges slightly curled, the stamp foreign and exotic. She picked it up, turning it over in her hands. The image on the front was a sunset over a vast desert, the sky painted in shades of orange and pink and purple, the colors bleeding into each other like watercolors on canvas. She could almost feel the warmth of that desert sun on her skin, could almost hear the silence of the open road stretching endlessly before her. The postcard was worn at the corners, like it had been carried for a while before being sent, like it had traveled as far as Jesse had. She smiled, recognizing the familiar scrawl on the back—Jesse's messy handwriting, full of loops and curves that somehow fel
