Page 70 of What Remains

"In a few days," she said, "we'll reach my parents' ranch."

Seth nodded. "If everything goes right."

"You'll head back to your people," Josie continued.

"And you'll stay with yours." Seth's voice tightened at the end.

The thought settled between them, a weight neither wanted to name. Josie's small motion of her hand cut carefully through the moment.

"This... is temporary."

Seth swallowed, his knuckles white on the wheel, as if he could hold the conversation in place. "Probably."

Josie exhaled slowly through her nose. "It's probably better if this is all it is."

She expected him to argue. He didn't.

He simply nodded. The quiet that followed wasn't defeat; it was the silence of two people admitting that survival had trained them to stay alert, careful, and never let desire convince them the world would be kind..

After a long stretch, Seth finally said, "Yeah. Probably."

They said nothing else, not because words ran out, but because there was no safe next sentence.

From the backseat, Layla held her rabbit between the front seats like a judge in a family meeting.

"Mr. Ranger says you're both grumpy," she announced.

Josie blinked. "What?"

Layla nodded solemnly. "He said nobody smiled after breakfast."

Seth glanced at Josie, then back at Layla, as if he'd forgotten children could turn tension into laughter with a single sentence. Josie looked at him, and for a moment the rest of the world slipped away.

Then they both laughed.

The sound was brief, but it loosened something in both of them. Not gone—nothing disappeared that easily—but settled, for now, where it couldn't drown them.

Layla beamed. "I fixed it."

"You sure did, peanut." Josie reached back and squeezed her daughter's foot. Layla returned to her imaginary conversation with Mr. Bunny, as if she'd solved the hardest problem in existence.

Chapter 15

Home Again, Josie!

By early afternoon, the mountains rose in the distance, and the flat prairie they'd spent days crossing gave way to rolling hills dusted in fresh snow. Fence lines stretched for miles, weaving through open pastures where weathered barns leaned against the gusts and abandoned windmills turned lazily in the cold air.

Josie hadn't spoken much that morning. For hours, she'd stared out the passenger window, watching a landscape she knew by heart drift past the glass. Every mile presented something familiar, and every bend in the road tugged loose another memory she hadn't touched in months.

"There," she whispered.

Seth glanced over. "What?"

She pointed through the windshield toward a distant Ridgeline etched against the gray sky. "I used to ride horses up there with my dad. He'd always hang back a little, let me get ahead." A faint smile crossed her face, and she laughed quietly, the sound small in the cab. "He never told me he was watching, but I just knew. He was always there if I fell."

A mile later, she pointed again, this time toward the rusted skeleton of an old grain elevator standing alone against the horizon. "We'd stop there after church every Sunday. Dad always bought us ice cream from the little store across the road."

The store no longer existed. Fire had taken it down to the foundation, leaving nothing behind except a blackened chimney reaching toward the overcast sky. Her smile faded.