They Left Me Behind on the Road Trip, So I Got on a Better Ride novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Sunset Point

I didn't answer Shay.

I didn't block her either.

I sat in the back of the Audi with Dot all the way to Bryce, staring at the message until the screen went dark.

"You can skip Sunset Point," Sawyer said from the front. "We'll go to a different overlook."

"Sunset Point is in the book," I said. "Page forty-one."

Dot patted my knee.

"Page forty-one," she agreed.

We spent the night at the lodge, and the next day I shot from the Navajo Loop trail and found nothing.

Hoodoos in the noon light look like wet sand.

By evening I had my camera on the rail at Sunset Point, with a hundred tourists crowded around me holding up their phones.

The amphitheater went from orange to red to a deep burning pink.

Dot sat on a bench behind me in her red hat with her Leica in her lap, not shooting, just watching.

Sawyer stood beside her.

I heard Brody before I saw him.

"Frankie! Frankie, babe!"

The crowd turned around.

He was coming down the paved path in his quarter-zip and his backwards cap, with his arms already open.

Jace was right behind him, and his little brother, and Shay at the back with her hoodie pulled down over her hands.

She wouldn't look at me.

Brody stopped six feet away and pressed both hands to his chest.

"I've been so worried," he said, loud enough for the whole rim. "You turned your phone off. You blocked me. I didn't know if you were alive."

A woman next to me lowered her phone and looked at him sympathetically.

"You knew where I was," I said. "You put me on the bus."

"There wasn't room in the car, Frankie. Our Jeep died. What was I supposed to do?" He turned to the woman with the phone like she was the jury. "We had a breakdown. I got her a ticket. And she just disappeared on me."

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