Chapter Two
Abigail
The silver sedan’s suspension screamed in protest as Abby's front right tire plunged into another rut.
She gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles aching, and eased off the gas.
The GPS on her dashboard had given up twenty minutes ago, the screen now displaying a blank, unhelpful gray grid.
Her cell phone had lost its signal long before that.
According to the dashboard clock, it was two in the afternoon, and the Montana summer sun was beating down through the windshield, baking the inside of the car.
The dirt road had steadily devolved from a graded logging route into little more than a pair of overgrown tire tracks swallowed by towering Douglas firs and thick, thorny underbrush.
Eventually, the tracks ended, terminating in a small, uneven clearing bordered by a dense wall of pine and the steep, rocky incline of a ridge.
A narrow creek babbled somewhere just beyond the tree line.
Abby threw the car into park. The engine shuddered and died, and the sudden, overwhelming silence of the wilderness rushed in to fill the cabin.
It wasn’t actually silent, she realized as she pushed the door open and stepped out into the sweltering heat.
The air was alive with the hum of cicadas and the rustle of wind through millions of pine needles.
But compared to the relentless, crushing noise of the sirens, the phones, and the voices demanding answers she didn’t have in Los Angeles, it felt like a vacuum.
She walked to the trunk and popped it open, staring at her haphazard pile of supplies. Step one. Shelter.
An hour later, Abby was soaked in sweat, her designer yoga pants dusted with dry earth and pine needles.
Her hands, unaccustomed to manual labor, were already scraped and stinging.
The tent, a massive, six-person dome that she received as a gift when she’d acquired a national sporting goods chain for the corporation, had proven to be a nightmare to pitch.
The fiberglass poles and confusing nylon sleeves might as well have been a game of pick-up sticks.
But it was up. It was lopsided, and one corner wasn't staked quite right because she had hit bedrock beneath the topsoil, but it was standing.
It would provide “shelter” in the most basic sense of the word.
She dragged her sleeping bag inside, followed by her cooler, the boxes of oatmeal, and the heavy plastic tarps. Lastly, she reached for the canister of bear spray and the water filtration straw the stranger at the store had dropped into her cart.
She sat cross-legged at the entrance of her tent, turning the heavy canister over in her hands. The stranger’s voice echoed in her head: The woods up here don't care how many badges you have.
He had seen right through her. He had looked past the defensive posture and the snappy retorts, right down to the terrified, fractured woman underneath.
It had been unsettling. Nobody in her old life had seen it: not her boss, not her ex-fiancé, not her parents.
They had just seen the perfectionist, the machine that kept running until the gears finally stripped and the whole thing fell apart.
Abby unclipped the bear spray and carefully slid it onto the waistband of her yoga pants, the heavy weight of it resting against her hip. She took a deep, shaky breath of the hot, pine-scented air.
She was alone. She was completely, utterly alone.
For the first time in three weeks, the tight, suffocating band around her chest loosened just a fraction. She didn't know what she was doing, and she was probably going to be hungry and miserable, but out here, nobody was watching her fail.