Chapter One: The Job
She had a duffel bag with a designer logo on it and a bruise blooming under her left eye that no amount of concealer had managed to hide, and Ryan would spend the next six hundred miles trying to figure out which of those two facts was the lie.
That was somewhere past the state line. First, there was the diner.
Ryan Cole was seventeen years old and three weeks behind on a decision he didn't want to make, sitting in a vinyl booth at the Sundowner Diner with a folder full of hospital bills he'd stopped opening because the number at the bottom never got smaller. Maddie's insurance covered the machines that kept her breathing. It did not cover the specialist in Phoenix who thought, maybe, possibly, there was a chance she'd wake up if someone got her there before her twelfth birthday. That specialist charged more per consultation than Ryan's dad made in a month driving a forklift with a bad shoulder.
So when Frank Whitfield slid into the booth across from him, smelling like the same drugstore aftershave he'd worn since he and Ryan's father served together, and said, "I've got a job. Cash. More than you'd make bagging groceries all summer," Ryan didn't ask what kind of job before he asked how much.
"Fifteen thousand," Frank said. "For one week of your time."
Fifteen thousand dollars. The number didn't fit anywhere in Ryan's head that made sense. "What do I have to do for fifteen thousand dollars?"
"Drive my daughter to her aunt's place in Sacramento. Keep her safe. Don't ask questions you don't need answered." Frank's jaw worked like he was chewing on something bitter. "There are people who'd very much like to find her before she gets there, and I can't be the one driving. Not right now. Not with what's happening with the company."
Ryan had read enough about Whitfield Energy in the last six months, courtesy of the news app he mostly ignored, to understand what's happening with the company was code for federal investigators, frozen assets, and a business rival named Marcus Reyes who'd been circling Frank Whitfield's empire like a shark that smelled blood in water.
"You want me to be a bodyguard." Ryan said it flatly, like saying it out loud would make it sound as absurd as it felt. "I'm seventeen."
"You're also the only kid I know who can drive defensively, shoot a lock off a gun safe, and keep his mouth shut, because your father taught you all three before you could grow a decent mustache." Frank pulled an envelope from his jacket and set it on the table between them, not sliding it over yet, like he wanted Ryan to have to reach for it. "I trust you because I trust him. That's the whole reason this offer exists."
Ryan looked at the envelope. He thought about Maddie's small, still face under the hospital lights, the machine that breathed for her making a sound like the ocean if the ocean were mechanical and indifferent. He thought about his dad's shoulder, wrecked beyond repair, and the specialist in Phoenix, and the calendar in the kitchen where his mother had started crossing out days like she was counting down to something instead of just marking time.
He reached for the envelope.
This is insane, he thought, and took it anyway. This is completely insane, and I'm doing it anyway, and I don't even feel bad about that.
"When do I meet her?"
"Tomorrow, six a.m., the old airfield outside town." Frank finally allowed himself something close to relief. "And Ryan. My daughter is going to hate this. She's going to hate you, specifically, for existing in her passenger seat. Don't take it personally. She's not angry at you. She's angry at me, and you're what's available."
Ryan should have asked more questions right there. He would think that, later, more than once.
He didn't ask any. He drove home instead with the envelope tucked under the driver's seat like it might combust, and told his mother he'd picked up a driving job for the week, and let her believe it was something ordinary, something like a summer gig ferrying rich kids to camp, because the truth would have put more fear on her face than the number in that envelope could ever erase.
The airfield at six a.m. was empty except for one black SUV, one driver Ryan didn't recognize, and one girl standing beside a duffel bag with a logo Ryan associated with department store windows he'd never once walked into, her arms crossed so tight it looked less like a stance and more like she was holding herself together.
"You're the babysitter," she said, before he'd even gotten out of his truck.
"I'm the driver," Ryan said.
"Same thing, different paycheck." Ava Whitfield had her father's jaw and none of his patience, and she looked at Ryan's truck, a decade-old Silverado with a dent in the tailgate and a check-engine light that had been on for so long it felt less like a warning and more like a personality trait, with an expression that made it very clear what she thought of it. "This is what my father hired. A truck that looks like it's held together with duct tape and a boy who looks like he's never worn a seatbelt in his life out of principle."
"I wear my seatbelt," Ryan said. "And this truck has gotten me through two winters on unplowed roads your driver back there would probably cry about."
Something flickered across her face, there and gone too fast to name, and for one second Ryan thought it might have been the ghost of an actual laugh before she smothered it. "Great. So it's ugly and functional. Wonderful. Let's go, then, before my father changes his mind and sends someone competent."
She's scared, Ryan thought, watching her hands as she hauled her own duffel bag into the truck bed before he could offer, refusing help like it cost her something to accept it. She's scared and she's covering it with being awful, and I have six hundred miles to figure out which one of those is actually true about her.
They stopped for gas twenty miles outside town, at a station with one working pump and a hand-lettered sign advertising beef jerky like it was the last beef jerky on earth, and it was there that Ava finally climbed down from the truck on her own instead of waiting to be asked, stretching in a way that suggested she'd been holding herself rigid since the airfield.
"You really don't know anything," she said, watching him pump gas with the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for people defusing bombs. "About why I'm being shipped to my aunt's like a piece of luggage."
"Your dad said don't ask questions I don't need answered." Ryan capped the tank and leaned against the truck bed, arms crossed. "So I didn't ask."
"That's either very smart or very stupid." Ava pulled a twenty from her back pocket before Ryan could reach for his wallet and disappeared into the station, coming back out with two bottles of water and a bag of the terrible beef jerky, tossing one bottle at his chest without warning. "Marcus Reyes wants my father's company. He's spent two years trying to prove fraud that didn't happen, and when that didn't work fast enough, he apparently decided the fastest way to make my father cooperate with a merger he doesn't want is to make sure his only daughter isn't available to inherit anything, ever."
Ryan turned the water bottle over in his hands, letting that land. "Your dad thinks this guy would actually hurt you. Not just, like, court stuff. Actually hurt you."
"I have a bruise under my eye that three separate people at my old school were told was a horseback riding accident." Ava said it flat, almost bored, the way people said things they'd rehearsed too many times to still feel raw saying them, though something underneath the boredom didn't sound rehearsed at all. "I don't ride horses."
The words sat between them for a second, heavier than the desert heat.
"Ava."
"Don't." She was already climbing back into the truck, jaw set, the performance sliding back over her face like a visor coming down. "Don't do the sympathy thing. I've had a whole team of very expensive adults do the sympathy thing at me for a week, and it doesn't fix anything, it just makes everyone feel better about not fixing anything."
Ryan got back behind the wheel without another word, because he understood, with an unwelcome clarity, exactly what she meant. He'd had a version of that same conversation with well-meaning neighbors about Maddie for months now, the careful head-tilts, the let me know if you need anything, none of which had ever once translated into an actual specialist bill getting paid.
They pulled back onto the highway in silence, the gas station shrinking to a smear of heat behind them, and it was another forty miles down that same long gold road, the desert flattening out on either side of them into stretches that shimmered like water where there wasn't any, before Ava said anything that wasn't a complaint about the radio, the air conditioning, or the general indignity of being trapped in a truck with a stranger who apparently thought classic rock counted as music.
"How much is he paying you?" she asked, not looking at him, her eyes fixed on the mirage rippling at the horizon line. "To babysit his inconvenient daughter for a week."
"That's not your business."
"Everything about this is my business. I'm the cargo." Something bitter cracked through her voice, quick and unguarded, before she smoothed it back over. "Fifteen? Twenty? He usually rounds up to a number that sounds impressive at dinner parties."
Ryan kept his eyes on the road, jaw tight. "Fifteen."
"Fifteen thousand dollars," Ava repeated, like she was testing the weight of it. "That's what I cost this week. Good to know."
"It's not about what you cost." Ryan hadn't meant to say it, exactly, hadn't meant to sound like he was defending her to herself, but it came out anyway, low and a little rough. "It's about what happens to my sister if I don't take it."
That got her attention. She turned in her seat, really looked at him for the first time since the airfield, something sharp and assessing in her expression that reminded him uncomfortably of her father. "What's wrong with your sister?"
Ryan hadn't planned on telling her. He told her anyway, the words coming out clipped and careful, about the accident, about the coma, about the specialist in Phoenix and the number that never got smaller, and watched something in Ava's face shift from performance to something rawer underneath it.
"I'm sorry," she said, and for the first time since she'd called him the babysitter, she sounded like she meant something she said. "That's not fair. None of that's fair."
"Yeah, well." Ryan shrugged, uncomfortable with how much lighter he felt for having said it out loud, and how strange it was that the person he'd said it to was the same girl who'd insulted his truck twenty minutes ago. "Not a lot about this year has been fair."
They drove in something that wasn't quite comfortable but wasn't hostile either for another hour, the desert sliding by in gold and rust-colored waves, before Ryan checked his mirror out of habit and felt something cold drop through his stomach.
The black car had been behind them for the last fifteen miles. That, on its own, meant nothing, out here where the highway ran straight and empty for a hundred miles at a stretch and everyone was going somewhere. What meant something was that it had matched their speed exactly three times now, dropping back when Ryan slowed for a curve and closing the gap again the moment the road straightened, the careful, patient rhythm of something that wasn't just another car heading west.
"Ava." He kept his voice even, kept his eyes flicking between the mirror and the road. "Don't turn around. Just tell me if your dad said anything about who might already know which road we took."
Ava went very still beside him, her earlier bravado draining out of her all at once. "Why?"
"Because there's a car that's been behind us for fifteen minutes, and it's not passing, and it's not falling back, and I don't think it's a coincidence."
She didn't turn around. She reached instead, without seeming to decide to do it, and gripped the edge of the seat between them hard enough that her knuckles went white, and when she spoke again, her voice had lost every trace of the girl who'd called him a babysitter at six that morning.
"That's not one of my father's men," she said. "I know all of his cars. That's not one of them."
Ryan's hands tightened on the wheel, and up ahead, the highway bent toward a stretch of open desert with nowhere to turn and nowhere to hide, the black car in his mirror closing the distance one careful, unhurried mile at a time.