CHAPTER 11 LANA
LANA
The interstate rises up out of the dark like a decision I can't take back. There are six lanes, maybe eight. It’s hard to tell between the semi-trucks and the dust storm.
It's been hours and hours of two-lane county roads with nothing but my headlights and the dotted white line for company so the trucks are a welcome change.
I keep driving. Then the interchange swims up green and enormous. It promises cities I've never seen and don't particularly want to. All I need to do is follow the signs. North. South. Merge.
I don’t have a plan. It’s just picking a direction and disappearing into it. This is the part I'm supposed to be good at. It’s what I’ve done all my life. So why are my hands shaking on the wheel?
Truth is, I know why. I've known for two hundred miles. I just haven't been brave enough to say it out loud in the empty car.
I shouldn't have left Jordan.
The thought has been riding shotgun since I pulled out of the driveway.
It’s only getting louder with every mile marker.
That part of this process is new. I keep waiting for the old, careful voice to shut it down.
The one that knows how this goes. The one that's kept me alive for years. But that voice is quiet tonight, and the only thing left is a different one. It’s low and steady.
It sounds an awful lot like a man who reads Gatsby and writes his phone number inside a kitchen cabinet.
You're not alone anymore.
I thought leaving was the right thing to do. But the truth comes for me. Driving seventy miles an hour with his coat still in my passenger seat because I couldn't make myself leave it behind makes it impossible to ignore.
I didn't leave to protect him.
I left because staying meant believing I get to keep something good. And I have never once in my life believed that. But maybe it isn’t too late. A plan starts to take shape in the corners of my mind. It’s a bad plan, but a plan nonetheless.
I'll drive until I hit the next real town.
I'll find a motel with a parking spot I can see from the bed.
And then when I'm somewhere Jordan can't show up and undo me with those dimples I'll call the number I have, in fact, already memorized.
I'll apologize. I'll tell him the whole truth. I’ll tell him that I love him and that the two weeks with him were the only time in my whole life I've felt like a person instead of a target.
It will hurt, but he deserves to know and I won't ask him to come. I'll just let him know that I wanted to stay. It isn't enough. But it's the bravest thing I've got.
I spend the next ten miles rehearsing the words Jordan, it's me, please don't hang up. Jordan, it’s Lana, I’m sorry. I was wrong.
I’m still talking to myself when the dark up ahead stops being dark.
My foot comes off the gas before my brain catches up.
It’s an old reflex. My body always knows first. The golden night sky is peppered with flashing lights in red and blue.
There are so many that the whole horizon flickers with them.
I get closer and everything comes into focus. There are lights strung clear across the interstate. It’s not one or two cruisers, it’s a wall of them. Light bars stutter against the trees and flares burn orange down the shoulder.
There is an impressive line of vehicles angled nose-to-nose across every lane like a gate someone built across the night. Or like a roadblock. My stomach drops straight through the floorboard. The four words detonate in my head all over again. Cute town, baby girl.
He found me once with a phone. He found me twice. He lit a fucking school on fire. Is it possible that he found a way to put a wall across the only road out of Whispering Pines? Of course it’s possible. I’ve let my guard down for fourteen days. Absolutely anything is possible at this point.
I'm already scanning for the U-turn. Maybe I can cut across the median or back up and take the exit ramp I just passed. My heart races. I’m so desperately tired of running, but I don’t have any other choice.
My hands have a plan my heart hasn't approved yet, because that's how I've survived. It’s what I need to do.
I put both hands on the wheel and prepare for a NASCAR-adjacent maneuver. But then… I see him.
I have to blink a few times to make sure my mind isn’t playing tricks on me and that he’s really here. But I close my eyes and open them and he’s still there.
He’s standing in the gap at the center of the line, where the cruisers leave just enough room for one car to pass.
There’s no fire helmet. No gear at all. It’s Jordan, in a jacket and jeans.
I'd know him in the dark from a mile off, lit up red and blue and bracketed by every law enforcement vehicle in a hundred miles.
I swallow down my nerves. Why is he here?
And how? I hope nothing awful has happened.
But as I get closer, I see that Jordan doesn’t look worried at all.
It’s just him, planted in the middle of the interstate like he grew there.
It’s like he's been standing there his whole life, waiting for my headlights.
I stop the car.
I'm aware of officers. I catch a flare-lit man waving me into the gap out of the corner of my eye. I feel my tires crunching onto the gravel shoulder. I feel myself throwing it in park with the engine still running. And then I'm aware of nothing at all except the door opening.
From there it’s a blur. There’s the warmth of Jordan's hands closing around my arms. There’s the sensation of him pulling me up out of the seat followed by the comfort of his embrace collapsing me into his chest.
The facade of control immediately melts with his touch. Tears stream down my face and I let Jordan hold me.
"Lana." My name comes out of him wrecked. "Lana. I've got you. I've got you, sweetheart, you're okay."
I'm not okay. I'm sobbing into the front of his jacket, which still smells like smoke and pine.
"It’s not okay. He found me, Jordan, he found me again, he sent…
There was a text, it was him, the fire was him, those kids could have…
I’m not a safe person for anyone to be around.
I had to leave and I’m so sorry. I know that hurt you.
But I had to, I couldn't let him do to you what he does to everything I love.
And I love you, Jordan, so much. I couldn't stand the thought—"
"He's done." Jordan takes my face in both his hands and tips it up so I have to look at him. "Lana. Look at me. He's done."
I go still. “No, you don’t get it. He’s never going to be done. There will never be peace for me.”
"You’re not hearing me, sweetheart. We got him.
He’s locked up and he isn’t coming out for a very long time.
" His thumbs move over my cheekbones. The movement is slow, like I'm something breakable, like I'm something worth being careful with.
"It all happened a couple hours ago. He's processed.
Arson, stalking, violating a protective order across state lines, and a stack more they're still adding up.”
The words don't fit at first. I've carried him so long he stopped being a man and turned into weather. He’s something I check the sky for, something I plan my whole life around. Now Jordan is telling me the weather's just gone.
"It's over?" My voice is barely there.
He takes my face in his hands. "It's over. He is sitting in a holding cell in Whispering Pines and he is never going to get within six hundred miles of you again. You hear me? He is not a problem anymore. He's just a small, pathetic man who's going to spend a very long time in a very small room."
All the tension and worry I’ve carried for years gives way and my body nearly collapses. But Jordan’s right there to catch me. He drops his forehead to mine, and I feel him shaking too.
"Lana, you almost didn't get to be here for it. You almost drove off into the dark and made me spend the rest of my life looking for you. That scared me."
"I know. I’m so sorry. I left you a note and I know it wasn’t enough—"
"I didn’t like your note.” He lets out a rough chuckle.
I shake my head, our foreheads still pressed together.
Realization dawns as I look at the scene around us. “Wait, all of this is for me?”
"I called every man I know and I came after you.
" He pulls back just enough to find my eyes, and his are blazing.
"I told you up front. I'm not built for casual.
I don't do anything I don't want to do. And I have never wanted anything the way I want you to turn that car around and come home.
I was going to get my girl no matter what it cost."
"You don't—" My breath hitches. "Jordan, I'm a mess.
I'm boxes I never unpacked and a chair under the doorknob.
I'm a woman who throws up and runs. I'm not…
I'm not what you said you wanted. A wife who wants a big life in a small town, kids walking to school, a porch on the Fourth of July. That's not — I can't be —"
"That's exactly what you are." He says it like it's the simplest fact in the world.
"I knew it on a tailgate looking at a valley.
The wife in my head finally had a face, and it was yours.
It's been yours since the second you walked into a burning building for a kid who wasn't even yours to save.
" His jaw sets. "You are the bravest person I've ever met and you are worth fighting for.
I will fight for you every single day for the rest of my life and I won't ever get tired of it. But I need you to do one thing for me."
The flares pop and hiss along the shoulder. Somewhere behind us a radio crackles. The whole interstate is holding its breath.
"Anything," I whisper, and I mean it, God help me, I mean it.
"Promise me." His voice drops, low and certain. It’s the same voice that pulled me out of the smoke when I couldn't find my own way. "Promise me you'll never leave me again unless we aren’t in love. I’ll never ask you to stay if you aren’t happy.
But you don't run because you're scared.
You don't slip out at five in the morning.
You come to me. You let me stand between you and the whole world if I need to.
" His thumb catches a tear at the corner of my mouth. "I love you. Promise me, Lana."
"I promise." I fist both hands in his jacket the way I did in the bed of his truck, like deciding something I've been deciding since the fire. "I promise. I'm not going anywhere.”
He kisses me before I can finish my thought, right there in the gap in the wall of light, with half the county watching. The red and blue washes over both of us and he kisses me like the rest of the night can wait. When he finally pulls back, he presses his lips to my forehead and breathes me in.
"When I get you home," he murmurs, just for me. His mouth is warm against my ear so half the county can't hear it. "I'm going to spend a very long time reminding you exactly what you almost left behind."
A shiver runs through me that has nothing to do with the cold. "Promise?" I whisper.
His grin against my skin is pure wickedness. "Damn right. Come on, sweetheart." I feel the smile against my skin. "Let's go home.”