“You don’t know that! You weren’t there, Holden. You didn’t hear all the horrible things I said to him. I called him a drunk piece of shit. I told him I’d never forgive him. I told him he was nothing to me! Why wouldn’t he disappear from my life? If I were him, I would!”

She looked at me—blubbery-eyed, devastated, practically begging me to prove her wrong.

Knowing full well that I couldn’t. I was, after all, there.

“We’re not gonna give him the chance,” I said.

It was a cold, hollow vacuum of a road trip. Endless stretches of pitch-black countryside. Occasional small towns—dead as midnight—filled the vast space in between like trail markers. The fact that I was going fifteen above the speed limit was overwhelmed by the three hundred and fifty miles between here and there.

I didn’t dare go faster. If I got pulled over, any chance of us stopping Roscoe was toast.

At some point, Holden fell asleep.

Maybe an hour later, Imogen fell asleep, too. And she had quite the impressive motor on her; her initial snore was a crack of thunder.

The only thing more shocking than the sheer decibel level was that she fell asleep to begin with. She’d won the Whose Music Are We Going to Jam Out To contest, which was why we were currently “jamming out” to the Les Mis soundtrack (tenth-anniversary edition). “One Day More” swelled from the Subaru speakers—sad, swooning, glorious. Until minutes ago, she had been singing along at the very tippy-top of her lungs.

“Okay,” said Wynonna, reaching for the volume knob. “Let’s dial down the revolution a bit.”

She dialed down the revolution significantly—settling on a soft, subtle rebellion.

It was only Wynonna, me, and Imogen’s snoring—set to a low-key revolutionary ambience.

Even so, it felt like there were miles of silence between Wynonna and me.

“Just so you know,” said Wynonna, finally, “I have lots of things I want to talk about, and a billion questions I want to ask, but they’re all bouncing around in my head like bingo balls, and it’s hard for me to make sense of any of it, so I’m mostly just silently panicking.”

“What sort of questions?”

“Am I making a mistake? Was the mistake not doing this two years ago? Does doing this mean I forgive my dad? Can I ever forgive him for what happened? What is forgiveness anyway? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Et cetera, et cetera.”

I laughed—a defenseless, caught-off-guard sort of laughter.

Something ignited inside her. She laughed as well. A nervous smile splintered across her face.

And then it faded.

“Do you think he hates me?” she asked.