Chapter 23 Ellis
ELLIS
The dry desert wind pressed against my shoulders, stirring the fine red dust that coated the trail skirting the rim of the crater.
I wrinkled my nose at the faint trace of it on my white sneakers.
I looked up from my feet and ahead, noting the way the trail stretched before us, then glanced into the crater itself—vast and hollow, a wound in the earth.
Liv had already floated off toward the center of the crater, now nothing more than a pink-haired speck in the distance.
Beside me as we walked, Dove’s fingers curled into mine.
Her thumb occasionally brushed the back of my hand.
The sun overhead contributed to the warmth in my body, but not entirely.
Not like the warmth I’d felt that morning, wrapped in the cheap sheets of the Wigwam Motel—Dove’s legs tangled with mine, her hand on my waist, and her mouth… God, her mouth.
She kissed me in a way that made the world spin. Anytime her lips met mine, it was filled with this languid sort of heat, and that morning it had been half sleepy, half claiming. Her body had pressed into mine as she cradled my face.
When she pulled away to shower, I stayed in bed for an extra five minutes, just to get the feeling back in my legs and remember how to breathe.
She knew what she was doing. That wasn’t new information. What churned around in my mind that day was my own lack of experience for whatever came next. How did I talk to her about that? What if she thought it was weird? What if I disappointed her somehow?
I groaned internally. The one thing I thought I was never going to have to worry about, and here it was, staring me down and laughing.
I was taken back to the conversation I’d had with Liv outside the toilets at the drive-in, and I swallowed, unable to believe that something I thought would never be a problem was, in fact, a problem.
I allowed myself a sideways glance in her direction, noting the faint crease between her brows, her eyes far away and distant. She hadn’t spoken much since we started walking the crater, only pointing out a particularly odd-looking cloud or snapping a selfie of us grinning in front of the rim.
We’d managed to get another tourist to snap our Polaroid—Dove’s arm slung around my shoulder, the pit yawning behind us as we grinned down the lens. I filmed some content for my followers, but even that felt like going through the motions. My mind was more on Dove’s unusual silence.
I wasn’t used to it.
What if she was second-guessing us? Surely not—not after how she kissed me that morning. No. Then what was it? I peeked at her again, her lips now pressed into a thin line.
“Are you okay?” The words tumbled past my lips before I could stop them. “Are you spiraling? Because that’s my job.”
A grin cracked across her face, and she looked at me.
“Ellis, are you making jokes?” she teased, squeezing my hand.
I rolled my eyes at her, fighting the smile tugging at my own lips.
I liked how she said my name.
“I’m fine,” she said with a sigh, looking down into the pit of the crater where Liv spun in endless circles, rising into the sky and dropping back to earth, over and over again.
“I’m worried the reading last night went too far—that it was too much for her.
She hasn’t spoken to me at all this morning. She won’t even look at me.”
“You know Liv,” I murmured. “She’ll bounce back. You struck a nerve last night, that much was obvious.”
“Do you think she really doesn’t remember how she died?” Dove asked after a beat of silence. She paused in her walk, and I stopped beside her.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted, biting my lip.
“I’ve kind of been tossing that around since she said she couldn’t remember.
She—she gets this look sometimes, like when a memory is too close.
Or when she talks about her friend, Bri.
It’s like she tenses up. And she has those random bouts of silence.
” I rubbed the back of my neck, the sun beating down on my shoulders.
“Right?” Dove said, nodding. “I feel more like… like she’s holding onto something so horrible, and she’s bound it up so tightly that it might just break her if she lets it out—if she acknowledges it.”
The wind picked up around us, whipping my hair and stirring more desert dust.
“Do you think she’s afraid of the truth?” I asked, pressing my sunglasses closer to my face.
Dove was quiet, her jaw tense as she looked down at Liv again.
“I think she’s more afraid it was her fault,” she murmured. “Whatever happened. She’s so… I can feel her guilt. It eats at her.”
Her words landed like a stone in my stomach.
I hadn’t believed in ghosts before Liv. Had zero belief in a magical afterlife.
Didn’t fall for fate or second chances or miracles, even if I was allegedly the product of one.
I never gave much thought to the dead having unfinished business.
I’d resigned myself to dying so many times that I always made sure to never have unfinished business.
But looking down at Liv, still spinning in circles below the crater’s edge, challenged everything I thought I believed.
And I believed in her. I believed in her pain and her desperation to make sense of her abrupt ending.
I wasn’t sure when, exactly, it had hit me, but somewhere along this trip, I realized I wanted her to get every bit of peace she could.
She deserved it. I wouldn’t be here without her.
“I think I’m going to scatter some of Margaret here,” Dove said suddenly, the shift in topic so abrupt I blinked twice and shook my head slightly.
“What?”
“Well, here’s as good a place as any,” she said with a shrug. “Margaret would have loved it. It’s probably the coolest spot on this leg of Arizona to scatter her.”
She dug around in her jacket pocket, pulling out her carefully portioned sandwich bag of her grandmother. I’d seen her scatter pieces of Margaret so many times now that it shouldn’t have been alarming, and yet it still knocked me off my feet a little bit every time.
It was also incredibly comical in its boring normalcy—a small bit of someone’s life stuffed into a Ziploc.
“We’re halfway around now,” Dove said. I looked back to where we’d come from—the observatory and entrance were far off in the distance. No tourists were near us. “Seems like as good a place as any.”
She looked at me once, and I gave her a small smile—making sure, once again, to stand out of the line of fire. Never again would I eat the dead.
Dove unsealed the bag and shook just as the wind danced past us again, and Margaret was carried away once more. And just like every other time I’d witnessed Dove scattering her grandmother along the road—taking her on one last adventure—that loosening feeling in my chest returned.
I let out a relieved breath.
“God,” Dove said, clearing her throat and wiping her eyes as she stuffed the empty bag into her back pocket. “Uncle Ben would totally shit if he knew what I was doing. I just love the fact that he has the dust of Margaret’s last vacuum in his cabinet. It’s ironic.”
I snorted and ran a hand through my hair, taking her offered hand and continuing to walk, her words still ringing in my ears.
Impact shapes everything.
As my eyes wandered over the scarred earth—into the pit of some old and violent moment on this ground—I felt a little heavier and a little lighter at the same time.
We drove straight through Flagstaff.
The only thing any of us had been mildly interested in was the observatory, but after a quick search of the prices—and comparing them to the entry fee for Bearizona Wildlife Park—we had to say no and go for the park, since it was on Liv’s plan.
This wasn’t our trip, I reminded myself.
Dove looked a little disappointed, and I made a quiet note to myself that when we drove back home, I’d take her there. We would do everything we’d missed on the way.
The roof was down again, and I had just finished a sandwich and my tablets, a bottle of water resting between my legs as I drove—wind in my hair, sun beating down.
I glanced at Liv through the rearview mirror, taking in her folded arms, her gaze fixed on something far away and unreachable.
“I spy with my little eye,” Dove drawled, breaking the silence, “something beginning with… R.”
I pressed my lips together.
“Rocks?” I said, deadpan. “We’re in the desert.”
“Nope.”
“Rust?”
“Nope,” Dove said, grinning, her Converse-clad feet propped up on the dash.
“Road signs?” I asked as we passed one that told us a toilet was up ahead. “Rest stops?”
“No and no,” she said.
“Regret?” I snapped, getting annoyed that I couldn’t guess.
Dove laughed. “Okay, dramatic. No, it was ‘rearview mirror,’ actually.”
I stared incredulously at the road ahead. “Are you—are you joking? That is so specific. As if I was ever going to guess that.”
The sun continued to bear down on us as we drove, I Spy fading into quiet conversation—or just music. Dehd and their music had once again become a constant soundtrack in the background.
Now, Dove sat in the passenger seat with her head tilted back against the chair, eyes closed. I wasn’t sure if she was asleep, but her hand had somehow found its way onto my leg and rested there as I drove.
I did my best to ignore the searing heat of the skin-on-skin contact.
I gripped the wheel.
Liv had remained silent in the back seat—far too pensive—and compared to her previous bouts of quiet, this one felt different. Off.
Then, as if she’d heard my thoughts, her eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. My chest tightened at the anguish in them—the first real emotion I’d seen from her since she got angry at the Wigwam Motel last night.
“Pull over,” Liv said, her voice so soft it was nearly drowned out by the engine.
I blinked, surprised, moving my gaze back to the road. “Huh?”
“Pull over,” she repeated, a little firmer this time.