They Left Me Behind on the Road Trip, So I Got on a Better Ride novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Bright Angel Point

Sawyer read the note.

Then he called his grandmother over and over while I stood there holding two coffees.

It went to voicemail every time.

"She turned it off," he said. "She turned off her phone. She's seventy-eight, she's on heart medication, she was in a hospital bed yesterday, and she has stolen my car."

"It's a little bit your car," I said. "She raised you."

He looked at me.

Then, slowly, he looked at the note again.

The last line. Kiss her again.

His ears went red.

"She heard us," he said. "Last night. On the stairs."

"Everybody in this motel heard us, Sawyer."

I called Shay.

She pulled into the lot in her aunt's pickup twenty-two minutes later.

Her hair was still wet from the shower, and a bag of gas station breakfast burritos sat on the passenger seat.

"North Rim," she said, reading the note over my shoulder. "Kiss her again? Oh my God. Did you?"

"Get in the truck, Shay."

"You did."

"Drive the truck."

Sawyer got in the back, between the burritos and a bag of pool noodles.

He didn't say anything about the speed limit when Shay went eighty on the highway out of St. George.

That's how I knew how scared he was.

He sat with his phone in his lap, refreshing the location he'd shared with his grandmother, which showed nothing.

I turned around in the front seat.

"She took her pills," I said. "I checked her nightstand. The bottle's gone."

"That doesn't make it better."

"She took her water too. Both bottles you clipped to her bag. And her hand cream."

He looked up.

"She packed," I said. "She didn't run in a panic, Sawyer. She planned it. She's not lost. She's going somewhere on purpose."

He stared at me for a long moment.

Then he leaned his head back against the seat.

"You're very calm."

"I've been left before," I said. "This isn't what it looks like."

The road to the North Rim went through Kanab.

Shay slowed down on the main street.

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