Chapter 3
The silence between them had settled into something less uncomfortable by the time the highway began carrying more traffic.
It wasn’t friendly, exactly. It felt more like two people who had accepted that neither of them was going anywhere and had adjusted to it.
Rachel had stopped trying to fill the quiet, and Sophie had stopped bracing for another attempt, which counted as progress.
“She might not actually be better,” Sophie said after a while.
“Who?” Rachel asked.
“My aunt. You keep talking like it’s automatically safer, but you don’t know her. You don’t know what her house is like.”
“She was screened. There was a home visit and a background check.”
“My mom passed all that too the first time. A home visit lasts an hour, maybe two. People can act fine for two hours,” Sophie said.
Rachel didn’t have a good answer. She knew Sophie was right because she’d seen it happen before.
Background checks caught records, not every private danger inside a house.
Home visits could miss the things people learned to hide when strangers came through the door.
She hated that the best answer she had was still smaller than what Sophie deserved.
“You’re right that the process isn’t perfect,” Rachel said.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t perfect. I said she might not be better,” Sophie said.
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“I don’t want you to tell me anything. I want you to stop saying it like it’s settled. Adults call places safe when they want you to stop asking questions. That’s all the word means.”
Rachel kept her eyes on the road and didn’t argue.
She didn’t fully agree either, and pretending otherwise would only make the conversation easier for her.
Sophie deserved more than a practiced answer that made the system sound cleaner than it was.
Rachel chose the slower truth, even if it left them both sitting with the discomfort.
“I hear you,” Rachel said.
Sophie looked at her sideways, as if she was deciding whether Rachel meant it or was using another caseworker phrase.
Then she went back to watching the road.
They had reached the edge of a commercial corridor.
Gas stations, chain restaurants, a Walmart, and fast-food places lined the long stretch of road with full parking lots set back from the lanes.
Traffic had thickened in the last mile, so Rachel slowed with the vehicles ahead.
A delivery truck moved unevenly in the right lane, and cars were already stacked behind the red light ahead.
The light turned green, and nobody moved.
At first, that didn’t seem unusual. Drivers checked their phones, missed lights, and took too long to react.
Rachel waited. Then she noticed the highway sign above the overpass to her left.
It was one of the electronic message boards used for construction notices and weather alerts.
The letters flickered, then scrambled into nonsense before the whole board went black.
She watched it for a second, then looked ahead at the still-stopped traffic.
The navigation screen on the dashboard froze.
The blue triangle marking her position stopped moving and stayed locked on a stretch of road she’d left two miles back.
She tapped the screen, but nothing changed.
A second later, it blinked and showed her position correctly again.
It could have been network lag. She’d seen that before. Her phone buzzed, and she glanced down for half a second. The signal bars were gone. They weren’t low or fading. The space where the carrier name should have been was blank. Rachel held the phone a little higher, but the screen stayed empty.
“Is your GPS supposed to do that?” Sophie asked.
“Probably a network issue. It happens.”
“Your phone too?”
Rachel picked it up at the next stoplight.
No service. She set it back down and looked at the road.
The phone felt suddenly useless in her hand, stripped of the reassurance it usually gave her.
She checked the mirror and the lanes ahead, trying to keep her movements ordinary.
There was no reason to alarm Sophie before Rachel understood what she was seeing.
“Dead zone. The coverage gets patchy out here sometimes,” Rachel said.
Sophie said nothing, but Rachel could feel her watching.
The light changed to green again. Cars in the left lane began moving slowly, but the right lane stayed frozen.
A sedan two vehicles ahead rolled forward a few feet while its driver kept trying the ignition without success.
A man in a pickup behind it leaned on his horn, and three other drivers joined in.
Rachel moved left to get around the sedan.
On the shoulder, a car sat with its hood propped up while a middle-aged woman stood beside it with her hands open at her sides, out of options.
Rachel passed the stalled car and kept moving, but she was already adding the pieces together.
A sedan had stalled at a light. Another car was dead on the shoulder.
The navigation screen had glitched, her phone had lost service, and the highway sign had scrambled before going black.
Any one of those things could have had a reasonable explanation on its own.
Together, they pressed against the edge of something Rachel didn’t want to name yet. She kept looking for the ordinary version of it, the version that ended with traffic clearing and service coming back. Rachel was still trying to make them feel separate when Sophie spoke again.
“What’s happening up there?” Sophie asked.
Rachel looked ahead. The commercial corridor stretched another quarter mile to a major intersection, a four-way signal she could see over the tops of the other vehicles.
A box truck sat stopped in the middle of the intersection.
More horns sounded, and a driver ahead of them got out of his car and walked toward something Rachel couldn’t see yet.
“I’m not sure. Probably an accident,” Rachel said.
“It’s not an accident.”
Rachel was about to ask what she meant. The question reached the edge of her tongue, then stopped there as the intersection ahead shifted all at once. Every driver seemed to hesitate, caught between moving and waiting.