“I promise. Now, Em, tell me about that game we used to play, the one with the green bucket…”

“I made that up, and then I changed the rules whenever I wanted.”

He breathed out a sound that was a laugh and a sigh in one. “I knew you did.”

“Then why’d you play?”

“Because I secretly liked being kept on my toes.”

“Hmm.” I smiled. I was so sleepy, and everything hurt. “Then I have a lot of work ahead of me.”

“We both do.”

I drifted but then came to when Tuck asked me a question, slurring my answer and then melting against his chest. We rode over bumpy ground and then smooth, the glow of the sun making me squint when I opened my eyes and looked over his shoulder.

I heard gunfire somewhere very close by, and Tuck made a sharp turn, flying around a big rig and then speeding up as the rumble of engines roared behind us. Wind whipped, we leaned left, then right, streaking past cars and trees before the noise of the engines faded behind us and I felt Tuck relax.

Voices shouted here and there, screams rose, and I kept my face pressed against Tuck, trusting him with every ounce of my soul, one of his arms clamped tightly around my waist, and the other steering the bike.

The air grew still, the rumble of the dirt bike fading away as I cracked open my eyes and Tuck lifted me from the bike. His eyes met mine and he said the most beautiful two words in the English language, the ones I’d been waiting to hear from him for two thousand miles and also my entire life: “We’re home.”

epilogue

Tuck

Over a year had passed since that early January day when we’d arrived back where we’d begun.

It’d taken Emily a good couple of months to recover completely from the severe concussion she’d suffered in that desert in the middle of the night not far from the place where I’d hunkered down in the darkness to rest for a few hours.

As strange as it was, in some ways, that rope the man had stretched in her path as he’d heard her zipping through the desert and seen her headlights, had been another sort of miracle. Despite that I’d been terrified out of my mind to see her lying there seemingly broken and half-alive, if she hadn’t been flung off the dirt bike right then, she might have flown right by me, and I’d never have known it was her.

I’d have continued on to San Diego, just missing her, and Emily would have attempted to make it home, perhaps encountering more danger…