“I remember her hair. She had long hair. And bells. Bracelets and anklets with bells on them. She even had bells on her skirts.”

I hadn’t remembered that part. But thinking back, I thought I did hear something the day Dance left our class, a jingling I had connected to the smell of weed, so much so that I imagined bells sometimes in the basement room when I worked. But I used to imagine a lot of things to make it better.

“She loved music. That’s why she left.”

“To be a singer?” I asked.

“To follow a band.”

Pink snow light changed the sky. I felt unsteady, driving the house, as if the heavy, extra weight might knock us off the road at any point. The roads weren’t really salted. Maybe the holler was saving its chemicals. Or maybe they had run out.

The strips of clear pavement grew thinner, narrowing as slush packed the highway. The ditches, fleecy with drifts, overflowed their banks. I drove over a chunk of snow, which crushed beneath the truck’s tires. We passed a dog, maybe a mastiff, ripping a dead deer into shreds.

We were going to take a southern route, which would make the trip longer but hopefully safer, with warmer temperatures, better roads. We were passing through West Virginia first, and avoiding cities if we could. I had been on trips before, but most of the states we were going to go through were new to me, and some part of me still felt excited to see them. I wanted to call my mama to tell her I was coming, but I didn’t dare. Lobo would pick up.

I couldn’t give advance warning, and I didn’t trust myself to speak to him at all. Even if I said nothing about the trip and my plan to take her back with me, he would hear it. He would know.

He could tell when I lied, he said. He could tell when I was planning something. He would always know, he said, when we hid from him, me and my mama.

We did hide, in the woods. She had showed me how, how to make myself small, how not to make a sound. We had tried to leave once. I had begged her to try again. But we had nothing of our own. Where would we go, what would we do? We had no jobs, no skills other than growing and trimming. No references. No credit score. No family waiting.

I had planned the route without really planning it. There was only time for me to plug the address from the postcard into my phone. That had always been enough before. But before the bridge into West Virginia something went wrong. My phone screen flickered and whitened.

The map disappeared.