The gas pump clicked off before Ava Roslyn Clark had finished deciding whether to leave Chesterbrook forever.
She sat behind the wheel of her dusty blue Subaru, one hand resting on the gearshift, while the other tightened around the folded map in her lap. Outside, Charlie’s Pike flickered beneath a bruised evening sky, its red-and-yellow sign buzzing like an insect trapped in glass. The single gas station in town had not changed in seventeen years—not the cracked concrete, not the warped awning, not the faded advertisement for cherry slushies taped crookedly beside the register.
Ava looked through the windshield at the road beyond the station. Route 41 stretched west toward the highway, toward Chicago, toward every place she and JD had named in whispers and circled in library books. Denver. Seattle. New York. Anywhere with buildings taller than the water tower and secrets that belonged to someone else.