I hadn’t asked for promises and he hadn’t offered any. Perhaps now was not the time for such things anyway.

I leaned my head back on the seat and stared out the passenger side window, mountains and desert moving past as Tuck went around a truck in the road.

What I did have to hold on to was that the bitterness between us had fallen away completely. We’d made peace. We’d made much more than that, but it was the peace I was going to attempt to take with me, even if I had to leave the rest behind.

But I didn’t need to think of that. Not yet, and so I held out secret hope that we would find a way.

It took us a day and a half to make it to Arizona, only traveling by daylight. We stopped to siphon gas when we needed to with the gas can and hosing Tuck had taken from the Garcias’ garage and put in the trunk, along with food, that we were still rationing, and water. I’d lost a significant amount of weight in the past two weeks. I thought about how the old me would have considered that a positive, and I wanted to grimace. The old me. This journey had transformed me, and I hardly wanted to think about what the next few years would do. Of course, that would depend on many factors, none of which were certain at the moment. For now, the entire country was just trying to survive, including us.

We made love at night, though not with the joyful abandon we had at the Garcias’ home. The sex in the back of the car in the pitch black was needier, more grasping, even if we managed to laugh about the ridiculous maneuvers made necessary by the tiny space. I’d wondered about whether we’d have made out in back seats had life as we’d known it not crashed and burned and so I tried to enjoy the reclaiming of what I’d considered lost. A smoothing of another one of those wrinkles in time.

After just such a back seat interlude on the second night of traveling, I climbed out of the car, mostly naked, and pulled a sleeping bag from the trunk. I wrapped it around me and then scooted up on the hood of the car and lay back. After a minute, Tuck joined me with the other sleeping bag, and we stared up at the stars.

“We could be in California tomorrow night,” I said. He’d shown me the route he thought safest on the map, and I’d been following the signs.

“If all goes well, I estimate we can get close before sunset. We’ll play it safe and cross the California state line the next morning.” I heard him look over at me but didn’t turn to meet his eyes. “Home,” he said softly.