Chapter 1
Christa
The headlights smear gold across the windshield, blurred by tears I’m not bothering to wipe away anymore. My knuckles had gone white on the wheel somewhere around mile forty. But I stopped noticing.
In the rear view mirror, my own face looks back at me. Swollen under one eye, a bruise already going purple along the cheekbone. I look away fast.
“Never again,” I say out loud, my voice cracking. “Never again Christa. You hear me?”
I’ve said it before. In other cars. On other nights, that somehow always end with me back in the same bedroom, the same fist and the same quiet apology the next morning like he’s doing me a favour.
Not this time.
I don’t know where the road leads. Don’t care much either. I have a duffel bag on the passenger seat, four hundred dollars in cash, and no phone, I threw it out the window an hour back, somewhere past the state line, because he’ll know how to use it against me if I kept it. Because he always finds a way.
“You’ll come crawling back. You always do.”
I press harder on the gas, like I can outrun something that lives inside my head.
The kitchen. That’s where my mind keeps dragging me back to, no matter how many miles I put between it and me.
It started over nothing, it always starts over nothing. I left a mug in the sink instead of the dishwasher, and he came in from the garage already wound tight about something from work, and the mug was just the thing his temper landed on. I know the signs well enough by now. The way his jaw works before he says anything, the way his voice drops instead of rising, quiet and level that’s somehow worse than shouting.
“You do this on purpose,” he said. “You like making me look like I can’t keep my own house in order.”
I said sorry. I always say sorry, even when I don’t know what the fuck I’m apologising for, because sorry is usually the fastest way through it. But that night sorry wasn’t enough, and I still don’t fully understand what flipped the switch, whether it was the tone of my voice, or the fact that I hadn’t looked at him when I said it, or nothing at all just a bad day that needed somewhere to go.
His hand was around my throat before I registered him crossing the kitchen.
I remember the specific, absurd detail of the refrigerator hum. How I can still hear it, underneath everything, this dumb mechanical drone continuing on like nothing was happening, like the whole world hadn’t just narrowed down to the black spots crowding the edges of my vision and the sound of my own pulse slamming in my ears.
He let go before I blacked out completely. Stood there breathing hard, staring at his own hand like it belonged to someone else. Told me I made him do it. Told me if I just listen, if I just stop pushing him, none of this would ever happen.
I nodded. I remember nodding, throat throbbing, unable to make my voice work, and some small, cold clear part of me, a part I almost don’t recognise, because it had gone quiet for three years had said, very calmly, underneath the fear: If you stay for one more night, he’s going to kill you. Not eventually. Soon.
I waited two days. Long enough to seem calm, to seem like I absorbed the lesson the way I always did, to plan without him noticing anything was different. I packed while he was at the gym, stuffing what I could into a duffel bag I kept shoved under a floorboard he didn’t know about, cash I’ve been skimming off the grocery budget for eight months without ever quite admitting to myself why.
Then I drove. And I haven’t stopped.
I grew up learning that nowhere was really safe. Not the group homes, not the string of foster placements that kept me just long enough to cash a check and then hand me back like I was defective. Some of them hadn’t been cruel exactly, just tired, or overwhelmed, or simply not built to hold onto a kid who flinched at raised voices, cried in closets and never quite learned how to ask for anything. There’d been a family once, when I was nine, who kept me almost a full year, long enough that I started to let myself hope, started to think of the yellow bedroom with the crooked blinds as mine. Then the wife got pregnant, and there was a conversation in low voices behind a closed door that I wasn’t supposed to hear, and two weeks later a caseworker was back at the house with a garbage bag for my things because nobody had thought to buy me a case.
I didn’t cry in front of them. I remember that clearly, some small, stubborn decision I made in the back of that caseworker’s car, that I wouldn’t give anyone the satisfaction of watching me fall apart over being unwanted. It was a decision I kept making, over and over, for the next fifteen years. Somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like strength and started feeling like the only thing I knew how to do.
I learned to expect that people left, or sent you back, or ran out of whatever they started out with, whatever reserve of patience, love or obligation had made them take you in to begin with. What I hadn’t expected, what still makes my stomach turn to think about, was how easily, at twenty-four, lonely in a way I don’t have words for, I’d mistaken he’ll never let me go for a promise instead of a threat. He said it in the first month, laughing, pulling me close after I made some joke about how nobody ever stuck around. I remember exactly how warm that felt. I remember thinking finally, someone who wants to keep me.
It took me three years to understand that keeping and trapping look identical from the inside, right up until they don’t.
Three years. Three years of tiptoeing, of telling myself it wasn’t that bad, that most couples fight, that he loves me even when his hand is around my throat. Three years of a version of myself getting smaller and smaller and calling it peace. I stopped seeing the few friends I made at work because he didn’t like how late I got home from drinks. I stopped applying for the promotion I wanted because he made some comment about how stressed I already seemed, how maybe I wasn’t cut out for more responsibility, and I believed him, the way I believed most things he said about me, because there was no one else’s voice in my life to argue with his.
My fingers find my throat without me telling them to. I make myself put my hand back on the wheel.
I still believe, somewhere stubborn and stupid in my chest, that safe is a real thing. I just haven’t found it yet.
The trees closed in a while back, no more streetlights just my own headlights carving a tunnel through the dark, and every so often a flash of eyes at the treeline that vanished before I could tell what they belonged to. I should have stopped in the last town. Got a motel room, chained the door, wedged a chair under the handle the way I used to on the nights he was a way for work. But stopping felt like being caught out in the open. So I kept going.
The radio died an hour back, and I haven’t bothered trying to fix it, the silence feels honest somehow, less like something I have to perform for. I passed a gas station with its lights off and a hand-painted sign advertising bait and ammo. I passed a mailbox shaped like a fish. I’ve passed nothing at all for what feels like twenty minutes, just unbroken treelines on both sides, the road narrowing until the yellow paint down the centre disappears entirely and it’s just gravel.
The last town had been small enough that I counted the buildings without meaning to, a diner, a hardware store, a church with a marquee missing half its letters I thought about stopping there. Had actually slowed the car in front of a motel with a flickering vacancy sign, hand already reaching for the blinker, before some instinct I didn’t examine too closely told me to keep moving. A motel meant a register with my name on it, or a fake name that would still leave a trail if anyone thought to ask. A motel meant thin walls and a door that anyone can kick in if they are determined enough, and I learned exactly how determined a person can be when they don’t want to let something go.
Out here, at least there’s nothing to find. No register, no desk clerk who might remember my face. Just road, trees and whatever comes next.
I thought about turning back. About how insane this is, driving into nowhere with no plan, no map, no one who knows where I am. But turning back means a version of a road that leads to him eventually, one way or another. And going forward at least means going somewhere he’ll never think to look, because I’ve never had thought to come to somewhere like this, and neither I’m fairly sure, has he. He likes cities. Likes people who can see him be charming, likes an audience for the version of himself he performs in public. Wherever this road goes, I’m fairly sure it isn’t anywhere he’ll follow, and for the first time in three days that feels less like being lost and more like being clever.
Mile markers stopped making sense. The road stopped being paved. And then the engine makes a sound I don’t like, a stutter, almost a cough and the dashboard lights gutter and go out.
“No. No, no…” I pump the gas. Nothing. Turn the key, one last painful click, and then nothing at all, just a silence so complete it feels like it has weight to it.
The car rolls to a stop on the gravel shoulder, tilting slightly where the ground drops off toward the treeline.
I sit there gripping the wheel, waiting for the engine to catch. It doesn’t.
“Come on.” I try the key again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. I hit the wheel with the heel of my hand, more out of frustration than any real hope it will help and let my forehead drop against it.
Alone, in the middle of nowhere. Dead car, bruised face, four hundred dollars that isn’t going to fix a single part of tonight.
The panic starts climbing before I can stop it, that same tightness in my throat, the old instinct to make myself smaller, to apologise for a problem that isn’t even my fault. “Breathe. You got yourself this far.” I remind myself.
I check the mirrors out of habit, months of watching for headlights that shouldn’t be there, and find nothing but dark behind me. Nobody has followed. I’ve been careful. The phone, the cash-only gas two towns back, even though my hands had shaken so badly the attendant asked if I was alright and I’d said yes like I believed it.
I almost do, some days.
Getting out to check under the hood feels pointless. I don’t know an engine from a fucking toaster, and standing alone on a dark road feels worse than sitting in a broken-down car with the doors locked. At least the car is something I understand the shape of. I try the key one more time anyways, some stubborn refusal to accept it, and get nothing but a single dry click for my trouble.
For a while I just sit there running the numbers in my head, the way I do with everything, an old habit from a childhood spent constantly taking inventory of what I had and what I didn’t. Four hundred dollars. Half a bottle of water. A duffel bag of clothes. No phone. No idea where the nearest town even is, only that it’s miles back the way I’ve come. I had a flashlight app I can’t use anymore, a spare phone charger for a phone I no longer own, and a blanket.
I almost laugh. It comes out more like a sob.
I let out a breath and reach into the back for the blanket, the one useful thing I thought to grab beside my clothes. I wrap it around my shoulders, pull my knees up to my chest and look out at the treeline. No moon that I can see. Just black on black.
“Just get through the night,” I mumble to myself. “You’ve survived worse.”
I almost believe that too.
The cold came slow at first, working through the seams of the blanket, through my jacket, through three days of running on no sleep and too much adrenaline. I tuck my hands under my arms and watch my breath fog in front of me and tell myself it isn’t that bad yet. I’ll figure something out in the morning. I always do. Mornings have a way of making things survivable that nights never quite manage, even when nothing about the actual situation has changed.
I think about the apartment, empty now except for whatever he’s already destroyed in his fury at finding it empty. I think about my coworkers, who’ll ask questions eventually, who I haven’t told anything to, because I learned not to trust anyone enough to tell them the truth about my life until it’s already an emergency. I think, briefly and uselessly, about the version of myself who might have had somewhere to go, a mother’s house, a sister’s couch, some name in a phone I could call collect and cry to. I don’t have any of those things. I’ve never had any of those things. I’ve got myself, a blanket, and a dead car in the middle of nowhere, and somehow that has to be enough, because it’s all there is.
It should terrify me more than it does. I notice that, distantly, the way I notice most things about myself these days, like an observer standing a little outside my own life, watching it happen to someone else. Here I am, alone in the woods with no way to call for help, and the fear that grips me isn’t really about the dark, the cold or whatever might be out there in the trees. It’s the same fear it’s been for three years, the fear of a car pulling up behind me, headlights in the mirror, a door slamming, a voice saying my name in that particular tone that means I’m already in trouble for something I haven’t done yet. Next to that fear, the woods don’t seem like much at all. The woods at least don’t have opinions about me. The woods aren’t going to grab me by the throat for leaving a mug in the sink.
I almost laugh at that, a short-broken sound in the empty car, and pull the blanket tighter.
Somewhere in the last hour, without really deciding to, I started keeping a kind of tally in my head, the same habit from childhood, running every inventory of every resource I’ve had, every asset, every possible escape route, the way you do when you learned early that nobody is coming to save you and you better know exactly what you have to save yourself. Four hundred dollars, a duffel bag of clothes, half a bottle of water, no phone or map, a blanket, a pocketknife I took from the kitchen drawer on my way out, more out of habit than any real plan to use it, sitting now in the bottom of my bag like a stone I can’t decide whether to be grateful for or ashamed of.
It isn’t much. It’s never really been much, any version of my life, any tally I’ve ever run. But I’m still here. I’m still breathing air that isn’t his, in a car that is at least, for tonight only broken and not dangerous. That has to count for something.
An owl calls somewhere past the trees, then goes quiet. A branch snaps far off. Wind, I tell myself, even though there isn’t any wind that I can feel or hear, but I tell myself that before I become hysterical. So I close my eyes and try to get some sleep, tomorrow I’ll think of something, I have to.
