Chapter Text
“I can’t ask you to do this.”
Ace is sitting behind Florence’s steering wheel, hands at 10 and 2 and gripping it so tightly they look like topographical maps — tendons as mountain ridges, veins winding like mighty rivers. His face is lit only by the lamppost on the curb; it leaves half of his profile cloaked in deep black, the other painted a bloodless, muted yellow.
For the first time, Nancy can look at him and see that he’s older than her. The extra years are drawn in the lines framing his full lips, in the purplish shadows haunting his hollow eyes.
“You’re not asking,” she says, clicking the seatbelt around her waist and staring straight ahead, not allowing herself a final glimpse of her house, squatting familiar and forsaken in the rearview mirror. “Let’s go.”
They get a couple hundred miles between themselves and Horseshoe Bay before stopping — and they wouldn’t risk it even then except Florence is running on fumes.
(Nancy knows they should ditch the old station wagon for something more nondescript and reliable, but she can’t bear to strip anything else away from Ace.)
Already, it’s almost unendurable. The text he’d gotten from Grant’s burner phone was short and blunt and immediately seared into Nancy’s brain: they killed her and they’re coming for you next. run.
They don’t know why. They don’t know when. All they know is fear and that their enemy is too big to fight.
So they fled.
It was an easy choice, the one all Nancy’s quick calculations added up to. And she’d been the one to say it out loud, to shake Ace out of his initial shock, to get them moving while they still had a chance.
(She’s always been good in a crisis. Able to box up all her emotions and store them behind thick steel doors, only to be examined and dealt with when the immediate danger has passed, when there’s enough space and safety to shatter into pieces.)
(She wonders if she’ll live long enough to get to that part this time.)
They roll in to a small gas station right off the highway in the middle of nowhere; it’s dusty and tired, without a security camera in sight. Even so, Ace ties his hair back into a ponytail and keeps his head down as he fuels up Florence. Nancy grabs one of his baseball hats that’s floating around the backseat, pulling it low on her brow before going inside.
A bell chimes over the door but the attendant doesn’t look up from scrolling lazily through her phone; the air smells like burnt hotdogs and Lysol. Nancy tries to be as inconspicuous as possible as she grabs jerky and trail mix and protein bars, then soda and hair dye and a road atlas, something she’s somewhat surprised to discover still exists. She’s not even certain they’ll need it; sure, GPS isn’t exactly an option given that their phones are in the bottom of a trash can back in Horseshoe Bay, but it’s not like they have any real destination in mind. Just away.
Still, finding the atlas feels like a good luck charm, a totem, something that says it won’t always be like this. That soon they’ll have direction. Focus. Hope.
She clutches it between her fingers tightly after checking out, her thumb sweeping across the glossy cover. It has a picture of a road, black asphalt with freshly painted yellow lines, winding open and inviting into an autumnal tree-lined landscape.
She wants to associate it with their escape. With freedom. But it’s just a road, and right now her brain can only take that to one destination. The Road Back.
She tosses it into Florence’s backseat facedown, the hope she’d felt just seconds ago already turned sour and sitting heavy in her gut.
The first night, after hours of running on little more than shitty gas station coffee and the last gasping fumes of adrenaline, they idle in a motel parking lot. The sign reads The Pegasus Inn; half the logo beneath it is burned out, the winged horse reduced to just a neon pink rump and hind legs.
Nancy stares at it as Ace flexes his hands around the wheel. They’re both desperate for sleep, for a minute to press pause, to breathe and regroup.
They’re also terrified to stop.
“We need the rest,” Nancy decides finally, her fingers light on his forearm. It feels tense under her touch, matching his clenched jaw and hunched shoulders. They’ve been driving for nearly twenty hours, the sun having risen and set again since they fled home. A crumpled takeout sack sits on the floorboard at Nancy’s feet, half-eaten fries gone soggy and cold and leaving a grease stain on the brown paper.
(She thinks it’s shaped a little like the logo for The Road Back, but then Nancy is probably just paranoid.)
Ace turns the car off, its familiar rumble replaced with deafening silence, broken only by the ticking of the engine as it cools.
“I never should have let you get dragged into this.”
It’s the first thing he’s said in hours, his voice rough with disuse. Shock seems to cling to him still, hardening around his edges like an exoskeleton.
“As if you had a choice.” She bumps her shoulder against his with a smile she dredges up from somewhere, small and cracked. “No one can keep me away when I’m working a case.”
Ace doesn’t smile back; she’s not sure he even heard her. He flexes his fingers and runs his palms down his thighs. He doesn’t reach for the handle.
“Come on,” she says, opening Florence’s door with a creak of the hinges. “Let’s get cleaned up and sleep. Everything will look a little better after.”
Except nothing looks better in the dingy motel room. The plastic key ring dangles from Nancy’s fingers, the maroon carpet under her feet so old and cheap that it’s no softer than the concrete outside.
But the pimply-faced desk clerk hadn’t asked questions when she’d paid in cash and given a fake name; he hadn’t even glanced up at her. No one would think to look for them here. They’re as safe as they can be while standing still.
Ace sets both their bags on the single sagging bed, its comforter stained and worn and made of a geometric print that hasn’t been in style since long before either of them were born.
They’d both packed emergency go-bags in the aftermath of Celia’s death, so they have the essentials. Clothes, toiletries, cash. No phones. No friends. There wasn’t time to tell anyone anything, really, besides a hastily scrawled coded message on a torn-out piece of notebook paper left inside the locked portion of Carson’s desk.
In a single day, every thread they had connecting them to their lives, to this world, has been cut.
Every thread except the one between them.
The thought makes Nancy feel something, but she’s not sure what. Anxiety, maybe. Or excitement. Probably some complicated cocktail of both, mixed with splashes of longing and lust and other l-words she doesn’t have the bandwidth to face right now.
Neither of them bothers to unpack; they have to be ready to run again at any minute. Nancy wonders if she’ll ever have clothes that aren’t crammed in a suitcase again. Ace just fishes around in his until he finds a lighter and a small baggie with a few joints in the bottom and steps outside.
The motel’s attempt at outdoor space is a pair of mildewed, cracked plastic chairs sitting on the stained sidewalk between their room’s door and the parking lot. Something about it reminds her of the crates they’d sit on behind The Claw; her heart seems to twist and impale itself on on of her ribs. For a single second she can see just how far from her old life she’s already gone, how much she’s lost, how lonely and lost and desperate her situation has become.
But then she leans in the doorway, letting the hard pressure of the wood against her shoulder ground her, and watches the tip of Ace’s smoke flare orange against the darkness. It’s a homing beacon. She matches his deep inhale, holds her breath with him.
For a long moment she just hovers, unsure if he’s looking for a private moment — but as soon as he spots her he tips his head toward the empty chair beside him. His earring glints with the movement, a point of light in the shadowy gloom. His smoky exhale curls and billows and drifts away on the wind.
She settles in, tugging her knees to her chest, and he carefully puts out the mostly unused joint, saving it for later.
“You don’t have to stop just because of me.”
“I’m not. I need to keep my head clear.” He spins the silver Zippo between his fingers, opening and closing the top with a series of metallic clicks. “Just wanted the ritual of it more than anything. Something familiar.”
Nancy sighs, pressing her back into the chair’s hard plastic. “I get that.”
He shifts onto one hip, tucking the lighter into the pocket of his jeans. “What do you think we’d be doing right now if we were still home?”
“Probably this same thing,” she says. “Except I’d be wearing my stupid Claw uniform and my hair would reek like fried clams.”
“Your hair always smells good to me.”
Nancy tucks a piece of it behind her ear, happy she’s in a dark enough shadow that Ace can’t see the blush she can feel burning her cheeks.
Silence falls, but it’s not awkward. Nancy uses it to stare out across the mostly-empty parking lot, littered with broken bottles and cigarette butts. It should be ugly but it’s not; the glass sparkles in the dim light.
Ace’s elbows rest on his knees, his fingers locking and unlocking. He stares down at them when he speaks. “You shouldn’t have gotten dragged into this. Way back when Grant first came to me, I should have found a way to save his mom without putting you in danger.”
“I made the decision to help you and I’d do it again every time. It was the right choice, Ace, because it means you’re still here with me.”
She watches him carefully, letting him see how much she means it. It’s terrifying, and exhilarating, and effective. Because something ripples across his expression, sending cracks through the brittle facade that had been plastered to him all day; seconds later it finally crumbles and falls all around them, the dust cloud dissipating on the breeze.
She feels the weight of her own tension slough off with it. Ace is sunshine and light and steadiness; if The Road Back had taken that from him, they would have been responsible for another kind of murder. One that, for Nancy at least, would be no less serious than what happened to Celia, to Grant’s mother, to countless others over the years.
“Still,” he says, relaxing back in the chair and sounding closer to himself again, the ice that had choked his voice thawing as his hand reaches for her across the dark expanse between their chairs, “I’m sorry this kind of thing keeps happening to you. That your life isn’t going the way you planned.”
Nancy’s hand crosses her half of the distance, tangling her fingers with his. “I’m not.” She’s almost surprised to discover how much she means it. “What I’ve got now is better than anything I imagined for myself.”
Ace’s head lolls against the cinderblock wall behind them. It’s painted a sickly green that looks gray in the low light; somehow, his eyes are still brilliantly blue. “The only thing you’ve got now is me.”
She leans toward him, still holding his hand, the chair’s arm biting into her ribs. “I know.”