This is why my heart soars when I find him parked right outside the roadhouse in a black Ford F-150 pick-up truck with the bike we rode in on strapped to the back.

“Figured this’d be more your speed for the second half of the trip,” he says, leaning out the driver’s side window. His voice is gruff, but his expression is strangely gentle in the morning light.

Tears of gratitude prick my eyes. At first, I’m so relieved. But then, I remember everything that happened yesterday.

Gratitude has no place here.

And as if to confirm that conclusion, Waylon’s expression hardens again as he commands, “Get in the truck.”

I climb into the passenger side and pull the seatbelt across me. “Where are we going?”

Silence.

And there's no display screen like in Jonathan's Mercedes. No robotic voice chiming about how many hours to go until we reach our destination.

The lack of technological direction doesn’t seem to matter, though. Waylon puts the truck in drive and surges forward down the roadhouse’s private road without so much as pulling out his phone.

He might not be telling me where we’re headed. But apparently, he knows how to get there by heart.

CHAPTER 5

Where we're going turns out to be another place without signage and located down a private road in a heavily wooded area. Except, in this case, it's in Iowa.

And this time, when we turn down the side road, there’s not a single roadhouse at the end of it, but an entire town.

Okay, not a town exactly. More like a giant dirt-shaped plus sign with trailers in each quadrant.

At least, I think it’s mostly trailers. Only a few structures have lights turned on at their front doors. I can only assume the other hulking shadows are also RVs.

But the trailer Waylon stops in front of at the very top of the dirt plus sign doesn’t have a helpful light attached to its front. If not for the illumination of the truck’s headlights, I wouldn't know it was even more run-down than most of the other ones we passed. It’s the kind of RV you see in old 90s films, featuring a ragtag gang of underdogs on a road trip mission to complete some sort of goal.

Anyway, this one sits several yards away from the rest of the mobile homes—as if the other trailers don’t want to be associated with it. And I notice there are no other mobile homes beyond this one.

When Waylon kills the engine and gets out, the only illumination comes from the cab's overhead light. Which makes the dark between the truck and the trailer seem particularly pitch black. I gulp, my born-and-raised-in-a-city brain unsure what to do with all this backcountry night.