Chapter 24 Dove
DOVE
My knees had begun to ache from how long I’d been sitting with my legs tucked under me in the passenger seat, facing Liv as we all sat there in silence.
I still didn’t move. No one did.
Ellis looked pale, as if all the color had drained from her face, eyes far away. She was probably stuck back in Liv’s story, her mind likely a war of screams and smoke and the fire exit Liv either had or hadn’t made it through.
Liv couldn’t cry—not properly. There were no tears or snot-filled sniffs, but she made soft, guttural noises, as if her soul was trying to.
Eventually, I cleared my throat, sniffling. My voice came out scratchy, hoarse now.
“You’re not a coward, Liv.”
She didn’t meet my eyes. She just continued to stare toward the horizon with a look so distant, I wondered if she could even hear me.
“You ran,” I said softly. “So what? That’s a normal human reaction. But you said you stopped.”
“Probably because I got shot or something,” she muttered, her voice flat.
Silence again. Then Ellis spoke, her voice soft.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry that you—that you died like that. I mean, I’m sorry you died at all, but dying like that… and then seeing yourself… seeing your organs… and then me. Me.”
Ellis’s voice took on a new tone—one of disbelief.
“Being with me all this time… watching me. Watching me waste…”
She trailed off, and my heart pinched at the sound of breathless guilt in her voice.
Another car roared past us, heading in the opposite direction, and I wondered what they made of us. Two girls on the side of the road, staring into an empty back seat. Clearly, anyone who’d passed us in the last hour or so hadn’t been too concerned. No one had stopped.
Thankfully.
“You know,” Liv said, her voice suddenly louder, losing some of the bleakness it had carried, “the only reason I signed up to be an organ donor was because I figured once you’re dead, you’re dead. End of story. Like, what would I need organs for, you know?”
She looked at us both, righteous indignation rising in her voice.
“I must have missed the small print where it says, ‘You might also witness organ harvesting in the afterlife and then get stuck to some depressed twenty-something illness influencer with a ring light and a guilt complex.’”
I blinked at her, her words catching me off guard—and then—
I laughed.
Any politeness or sensitivity for the moment flew out the window as the bubble in my throat burst—sharp and loud and uncontrolled.
I clutched my stomach as hysteria rolled through me, and Ellis looked at me, wide-eyed, for a moment before her own lips trembled and laughter escaped.
She quickly clapped a hand over her mouth, muffling the sound behind her fingers.
Liv looked between us, deadpan, as she said, “You two are more twisted and broken than I am.”
But then her mouth twitched.
And she was laughing too.
It wasn’t pretty, the laughter we shared.
It was unhinged and desperate. It was the laughter that’s left only when crying has taken everything out of you.
We laughed until the cackling faded, carried off on the desert wind that was slowly picking up—more chilled now, the sun seeming to carry less of its warmth.
Liv didn’t speak for a moment. She sat there wringing her hands, then squared her jaw and bounced a curled fist against her thigh, something resolute forming in her eyes.
“Okay,” she said with a nod. “I’m done drawing this shit out.”
I blinked at her. “What?”
“I don’t want to see anything else,” Liv said as she brushed her hair out of her face. “I don’t need to see any bears or volcanoes or museums. I still want to drive the route, but I want to go straight through to Santa Monica now.”
“But—” I started, as Ellis blinked with surprise beside me.
“I want to get to the end,” she cut me off, raising her hand.
“I do. But I can’t—I don’t care about seeing shit anymore.
I’ve had my fun. I’ve done some stuff. I need to get home.
I need—I need to make sense of everything.
I have to face my life. Being… being anywhere else just feels wrong now.
I’m sure you guys can see whatever else you missed on the way back. When I’m… gone.”
Ellis looked at her—not with outrage at the abrupt dismissal of the laminated, color-coded schedule, not with anxiety at the sudden change in plans. Her face was calm, full of understanding, and she nodded wordlessly, tapping her fingers against the headrest.
“Okay,” Ellis murmured, looking to me. “We drive straight to Santa Monica. We’re just outside of Williams… roughly six hours, maybe seven, from the end of the route. Driving safety says you should take a break every two hours,” she mumbled, rubbing her brow. “There’s two of us. We can split it.”
I looked back to Liv, who smirked and rolled her eyes, throwing her arms behind her head—waiting for Ellis to sort it all out in her mind before she took charge and organized the situation.
No smart comments. Nothing to set her off.
She just let her go with it, until Ellis seemed comfortable with the change.
“Okay. We can do this,” Ellis said with a nod, yanking the binder out from under my seat.
“We’ll have dinner here, and we can stop at this small minimart and get extra food.
Just in case we need anything. Extra water.
Whatever. We’ll get in late—I’m not really sure where we’ll sleep, but surely there’ll be a motel… ”
“You can go to Jedd’s,” Liv cut in. “Now we know he’s alive. He’ll be fine.”
Ellis shot me a wary look.
I shrugged.
She squared her shoulders and stuffed the binder back under my seat, then spun around, buckled up, and turned the engine over with a determined look on her face.
“All right,” she said, her voice high-pitched. “All right. We can do this. Let’s go.”
No more stops.
No more detours.
Just the open highway, stretching endlessly toward our final destination.
We’d put the roof back on, the sun had dipped below the desert rim hours ago, taking its warmth with it.
The wind was cooler now, crisper. We’d gassed up at the next stop we found and stocked up on snacks, water, and some surprisingly good-looking sandwiches we planned to eat for dinner when it was time for Ellis to take her pills.
I was driving the first leg of our shift, the next two hours looming in front of me, my eyes fixed on the faded white lines slicing through the dark. Ellis sat beside me, one leg pulled up onto the seat, hair loose around her shoulders as she worked on editing her latest planned upload.
She was calm.
So calm about the abrupt shift in our plans. She had just… gone with it. I didn’t know if it was Liv’s revelation that made her shelve her own feelings or if the guilt—heavier than before—was eating at her so much that she refused to utter a single complaint about this new nonstop schedule.
I sighed quietly and watched the darkening road ahead, Dehd playing softly in the background.
My mind flicked back to the cards, my gaze briefly shifting to Liv in the back seat.
She stared out the window, watching the scenery blur by.
I thought about her reaction to last night’s reading, the way she’d gotten so angry and left.
The way that anger had followed her into today—first as silence, then as that painful confession, and finally, as her decision to skip the pretense and head straight for the end.
To wrap it all up, urgency pouring out of her.
The cards.
My mind danced through the countless conversations Margaret and I had had about them. I pictured the shop—the back room with the white wicker chair, the mismatched candles, the salt lamps and incense, and the reading table.
Right on that table, facing the direction a customer would sit, was an A4-sized laminated message that had been taped down for as long as I could remember.
This reading is a guide, not a guarantee.
The cards show us the possibilities and the now. You are responsible for choosing your own path.
I used to roll my eyes at it, thinking it so out of place—a silly layer of protection Margaret had insisted on. She said it was to stop people from marching back in months later, furious with her or Ida for quitting jobs, dumping partners, or realizing their fresh start had ended in disaster.
“You would be amazed, Dovey,” Margaret murmured once when I questioned her about it. “You would be amazed at how many people will hand over their future to a piece of colourful card and a stranger with incense and heavy eyeliner.”
I’d always thought the statement a little dramatic back then, but now… now I wasn’t quite so sure.
“We have a responsibility to people, Dove,” Margaret had told me with steady eyes. “People come to us because they already know the answer—they just need permission to admit it and act. The things we tell people alter their lives. Don’t take that power lightly.”
She was right.
For the first time, I understood the laminated message and her steely words whenever she guided me through the practice.
Because I had given Liv a reading last night—explained the cards as they fell from the shuffled deck—and now, thanks to that reading, Liv had made a choice.
She had finally settled on something she’d likely been deliberating this entire trip.
All because of my reading.
But it was something she knew she was always going to have to face. I hadn’t shown her or told her anything she hadn’t already known or seen in her own reflection.
I hadn’t pulled fate or played games.
I’d just held up a mirror.
“I met Kyle and Ryan in junior year,” Liv said, her voice cutting through the silence. Ellis paused what she was doing—not looking away from the screen, but her finger no longer dancing across it. I glanced back through the rearview mirror.