PART I — The Washout

The desert, when it breaks, doesn’t do you the courtesy of easing in. One minute it’s a sheen of heat and distance. The next it’s water. The sky drops its pretense of blue and empties a steel bucket across the miles. Mara Ellison had seen the haze gathering all afternoon from her seat in the last car—heat stacked on heat—and told herself it would pass. She didn’t pack for disruption. She packed for being the kind of person who never needed to.

By the time the train sighed into Ocotillo Station, the world was a smear of rain and blown sand. The conductor’s voice, equal parts apology and instruction, crackled over the speakers: “Flash flooding east of here. We’re holding until the maintenance crew confirms the tracks. Folks, it may be a while.”

A while meant what, exactly? An hour? Two? Mara tapped her calendar. Every block a color, every color a promise. She had a breakfast with a donor on Wednesday, a Thursday stand-up, a Friday flight to a site visit she’d carved from granite and grit. She’d just spent three days in Santa Fe, half-listening to other nonprofit leaders debate “transformational synergy” while she quietly fixed their spreadsheets in her head. Now she could feel the muddy hand of chaos pawing at her neat week.

People funneled into the station, then out of it again when the air inside proved somehow wetter than outside. The building was the color of toast left in too long, a rectangle with a jawline. A tin roof held down by concrete bricks. On the platform, the rain stitched a bright gray curtain. Somewhere unseen, thunder made a joke with no punch line.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to disembark for the time being,” the conductor said. “Station staff tell me there’s a diner up the road and a motel across the tracks. Keep your tickets handy. We’ll update you.”

Mara stood, collected her bag, and put on the jacket that could go from boardroom to blizzard. She was careful, always, to dress in neutrals—colors that didn’t demand anything from anyone. She carried a tote with an emergency phone charger, a notebook, a protein bar, and a curled-up competence that had never failed her.

On the platform, rain slapped her face with the indifference of a cat. People milled: a family with an overstimulated toddler; a kid whose backpack looked heavier than he was; an older man hugging a guitar case as if it were keeping him upright; three college friends in hoodies crumpled with laughter that was half-fear. No one was exactly in charge. In the absence of a plan, Mara felt the familiar lift inside, like a runner at the starting pistol.

“Okay,” she said, more to herself than anyone, and then to the air at large: “Let’s pair up. Stay together. There’s a diner” —she pointed at a flicker of neon through the gauze of rain— “and a motel. If you don’t have a room, I can help you book. The ground’s slick, avoid the ditch, hold onto the railing.”

A few people looked grateful. One or two bristled, their faces saying: Who are you to tell me where to step? Mara smoothed her tone, turned it warm, made it a suggestion. She’d learned years ago you could get anyone to go anywhere if you braided care through instruction.

The diner sat a short, wet walk away, under a sagging sign that once read Sweetwater Kitchen and now read Sw ter Kitc. Inside, the air tasted like coffee and fry oil and damp denim. A waitress with a braid and an eyebrow ring—Nadia, according to a badge that had seen some things—moved among the sudden crowd with the absent grace of the very busy.

“Sit where you can,” Nadia called. “We’re out of French toast until the truck can get through. But we got pie like you wouldn’t believe. I’ll start coffee at the back and work my way up.”

Mara guided a couple of wandering souls to a booth and looked up to wave the family with the toddler over to four stools that only wobbled a little. A man in a cowboy hat that had survived storms before this one tipped it at her, as if to say: no harm in helping.

She slid into an empty booth and took a breath. The room hummed with crisis-humor. You could feel everyone ginning themselves up into stories they’d tell later. Remember that time the whole desert turned to soup? Remember when we were stranded at Ocotillo?

Mara pulled out her phone and texted Neil.

Mara: Train stuck. Flash flood. Love you. Will keep you posted.

Neil’s reply blinked up almost immediately, as if he’d been carrying the phone like a tiny lantern waiting for her message.

Neil: Yikes. You ok? Want me to look up weather?

Mara: I’m on it. Just annoying.

Neil: Of course. Be safe. Send me a picture if you can.

Mara: Of the flood?

Neil: Of you.

That last line was so purely him that she felt a pinch. She took a quick selfie anyway—storm hair, light catching the anxiety she’d half-hidden—and hit send. He’d set it as her contact image, probably. He did that kind of tender, earnest thing without irony. Part of her softened. Another part did the math of delays, connecting flights, donors.

“Hello, stranger.”

The voice came from the end of the booth. Mara looked up and time did a double take. Sloane Bishop: her freshman-year roommate who’d once cut her hair in a dorm bathroom while drunk on Boone’s Farm; the friend who’d taught Mara to smoke clove cigarettes out of the window and collected people like seashells; Sloane who’d drifted away senior year on a current of harder parties and softer choices. Now she stood with a damp scarf and laugh lines that weren’t jokes, her mouth set in a brave line like a seam sewn twice.

“Oh my God,” Mara said, laughter spilling out in the way that happens when a past life shoulder-checks the present. “Sloane? Are you serious?”

Sloane slid in across from her, the vinyl squeaking. “I’d make a joke about fate, but I don’t think fate has time for diners with coffee that tastes like a campfire. Can I—?” She gestured toward the seat as if she hadn’t already taken it.

“Please,” Mara said. “What are you—how are you—”

“Long story. Short version: I live near here now, sort of, up the road in Sonora Trace. Gallery job, small apartment, cactus and a milk crate full of books. I was on my way back from Phoenix and thought I could outrun the storm. Turns out I can’t outrun meteorology.”

“None of us can,” Mara said, then laughed at herself. She hated small talk when it sounded like a life motto.

Nadia materialized with two coffees. “You two look like you have a lot to cover. I’ll be back with menus when I locate them from the flood zone we call ‘the counter.’”

Sloane wrapped both hands around her cup like it had a pulse. “Mara Ellison. Somehow COO fits your mouth. I can hear it. I can also hear the invisible checklist behind your eyes. Still the best organizer in any room?”

Mara bristled. She hated how the word “organizer” sounded next to “room,” like she was a closet shelf. “I like keeping things from falling apart,” she said. “It’s a public service.”

“And at home?” Sloane said, mild voice, feline curiosity. “Is it a public service there, too?”

Mara smiled the kind of smile that deflects like a shield. “Neil appreciates structure.”

“Do your kids?”

The question slipped into Mara’s ribs like a thin blade. She pulled her phone reflexively, as if it could throw up a defense. Avery had texted a photo of her new apartment—a corner of a window, a plant she would kill by June, a lamp she’d thrifted from a store with both a cat and incense—and a line: Floods?? You ok? love u. Lucas had left a thumbs-up reaction to a meme she’d sent last night. If love was signal strength, theirs wavered between three bars and one.

“They’re fine,” Mara said too quickly. “Avery’s in Austin, trying on different adjectives to see which sticks. Lucas is… figuring it out. You know boys.”

Sloane raised one eyebrow. “I know human beings.”

Mara took a too-hot sip of coffee and burned the soft roof of her mouth. The pain felt deserved in a way that annoyed her further. “What about you?” she said, switching fields like an agile midfielder. “Tell me your story.”

Sloane shrugged. “I tried a lot of things. Tried on a marriage. Tried on a different one. Tried sobriety, liked it, kept it. The gallery sells work by artists who don’t have agents and aren’t good at talking to white walls. I trade seven hours a day for rent and a feeling of usefulness. I paint badly when no one’s looking. I sleep better than I used to and worse than I want to. That’s the brochure.”

“That’s honest,” Mara said before she could stop herself.

“That’s the only thing I’ve got extra of,” Sloane said. “Honesty and sunscreen.”

Lightning shook the sky. The diner flickered, went dim, recovered. People clapped like at the end of a plane landing. Nadia slid plates onto nearby tables as if keeping everyone fed would bargain with the weather.

“So,” Sloane said, stirring her coffee just to have the small activity. “Avery. How is she really?”

Mara opened her mouth with the automatic words: She’s great, she’s thriving, she’s exactly where she needs to be. The speech unrolled like a museum placard. But Sloane’s face—open, unshocked, not impressed and not unkind—invited something else.

“She’s… light on me right now,” Mara said. The words tasted strange; she almost didn’t recognize the voice. “She calls Neil more. She says we both ‘get’ her but somehow he gets more of her. Which is fine,” she added too fast. “He has more time.”

“Does he?” Sloane asked.

“No,” Mara said, then laughed, feeling stupid and free at the same time. “No, he just doesn’t try to fix everything she says.”

Sloane leaned back. “You asked what my story was. I’ll trade for one of yours.”

Mara thought of a thousand curated stories, the ones she told at panels: the time she moved a grant deadline by a month with three calls and a spreadsheet; the time she persuaded a city council member with an anecdote about her grandmother that wasn’t strictly true. Instead, she said, “Avery called last fall to say she was thinking about switching majors. She was two courses from finishing economics, and she said she might want to pivot into design. I sent her a list of reasons not to. She didn’t ask for it, but I sent it anyway. ‘Sunk costs,’ I said, and ‘opportunity cost,’ and ‘networks matter,’ and when she didn’t answer right away I forwarded two articles. Then when she still didn’t answer I sent a ‘just checking in :)’ and a calendar invite for a time we could talk. She declined the invite. She switched majors a week later and didn’t tell me for three weeks. When she did, I said all the right words, but inside I was writing a budget for her life in which I held the final say.”

Sloane’s smile was small and somehow infinite. “There it is.”

“There what is?” Mara heard the defensiveness even as she softened into it.

“The thing the desert strips you down to once you stop moving,” Sloane said. “Love that comes out as a plan. It’s useful until it isn’t. It’s caring until it’s pressure. You don’t have to take my word.”

“I’m not taking your word,” Mara said automatically, then shook her head. “God. Listen to me.”

“I am.” Sloane looked around at the room, the people huddled in forced community, rain tattooing the windows. “We can talk later. They’re making an announcement.”

The conductor stood on a chair near the counter, holding a battery-powered megaphone that had seen county fairs. “Tracks are closed until morning at least,” he said. “Buses from Yuma are trying to get through but the wash five miles west is a mess. Motel across the way’s got twenty rooms. Another smaller place—El Rancho—is a mile down. If you have relatives within driving distance, now’s the time to text them. We’ll update you by eight a.m. We’re sorry.”

The air picked up a stutter of panic. You could feel it ripple—plans crumpling like paper. People reached for phones as if they were flotation devices.

Mara stood, the chair’s feet screeching. “Okay,” she said, and wished she’d said nothing before she’d said it, but the words were out now and the room had already turned toward her. “Let’s make a list. If you need a room and can’t afford one, or if you can share, give me your name. If you’ve got a car, note your make and seats. We’ll run a quick triage—families with kids first, then elderly, then anyone with meds that need refrigeration.”

She looked at Sloane, poised for the eye-roll, the smirk. Instead, Sloane’s expression was neutral and curious, like watching a wild thing do what it always does.

“Who put you in charge?” a man near the counter called, half-joking and half not.

“She’s got a clipboard,” Nadia said, placing one on the table in front of Mara as if conjured. “That counts.”

“Fine,” the man said, grinning now. “Let the clipboard lady allocate us.”

It took thirty minutes to wring order from the wet. Mara had three strangers at her table at once, all talking in different anxious registers. She made columns, she made sense, she made a system with the motel clerk, a woman with eyes like wet obsidian who trusted Mara’s lists the way you trust a bridge: gingerly at first, then with both feet. Within the hour, families had rooms, the college kids had four to a room and a story, the older guitarist had a room of his own and a chair to set his case on.

Sloane watched, occasionally ferrying coffee, occasionally ferrying a person. She didn’t interfere and didn’t fawn. It made Mara like her, a little, in the way you like a person who doesn’t try to rearrange your internal furniture.

When the initial chaos simmered to a plan, the room exhaled as one creature. You could feel people relax into the knowledge that even bad nights end.

Mara allowed herself a breath and the smallest hit of pride. She was good at this. She was a person who kept people dry. She made the world less sharp.

Nadia slid by and tapped the counter with a spoon to get everyone’s attention. “Heads up—we’ve got a runner. A little guy in a red coat, about this high.” She held a hand mid-thigh. “Mama’s at the front with me. He took off when the power blipped. Anyone sees him, holler.”

The room shifted again, from fed to focused. That was the thing about crisis: it was an attention economy.

Mara was already up. “Divide and sweep,” she said to no one and everyone. “Two by two. Don’t go near the ditch.” She pointed to the dark slice of the wash across the road that had turned into a narrow river. “Call if you see anything red.”

The world outside was still raining but less like a bucket, more like a shower that wouldn’t turn off. The neon’s hum sounded hopeful. Mara took the left side of the lot with Sloane matching her stride.

“You’re good in a storm,” Sloane said, scanning under trucks, around the ice machine that shuddered and groaned.

“I like when people need me,” Mara said, so flatly she startled herself. She stopped, hand on the cold metal of a vending machine that had outlived several owners. “I mean—I like being useful.”

“Those aren’t the same sentence,” Sloane said.

They found the boy near the mailbox fashioned from an old gas can, crying without breath, hiccuping on the air. He was three, maybe, and made of red coat and wet cheeks. He’d tried to jump the river from a concrete lip and failed at the physics, the way you fail when you’re small. He hadn’t gone in—someone’s hand had caught the hood, thank God—but the moment had scared him down to the nails.

“Hey, hey,” Mara said, kneeling. She didn’t have the right voice for toddlers. Her voice came in two modes: presentation and plan. She softened it now, tried for a human middle. “Hey, brave man. You got out here all on your own?”

Sloane crouched too, but slightly behind, letting the kid see Mara as the only planet in this moment. “I bet the world looks huge from where you are,” she said conversationally, as if narrating the weather. “It’s noisy, huh? Rain’s loud when you’re three.”

The boy blinked, attached himself to Mara’s damp sleeve like Velcro, and looked up with the solemn, surprised faith of the very small. “Mama,” he said.

“We got you,” Mara said. She scooped him up, light as a question, and stood. He went limp with relief, head on her shoulder, and for a second something like an ancient door opened in her chest. Warmth moved through, and a grief so sweet it was almost delicious. She missed when Avery had done that—gone boneless with trust, let the world be Mom’s problem.

They brought him in and his mother cried into his wet hair while thanking everyone in a looping, breathless gratitude that made the room kinder. The guitarist played one soft chord in the corner. People clapped again, this time for a reason.

“You did good,” Nadia said to Mara when the room returned to its new normal. “You want a piece of pie or a trophy? I’m out of trophies.”

“Pie,” Mara said, and Sloane said, “Pie,” at the exact same moment, and they both laughed in a way that took the edges off everything.

They ate cherry pie that stained the tongue and watched the window. The rain slowed to a steady, workable pour. The diner didn’t quite empty, but people drifted to their rooms at the motel across the tracks, to couches offered by local cousins, to the benches in the station where they could pretend trains came on time.

“You got a room?” Sloane asked.

“Yeah.” Mara held up an actual metal key. “It’s like a prop from a movie where people cheat on each other in the afternoon.”

“That would be all the movies,” Sloane said.

“Come by in the morning?” Mara heard herself ask before she could weigh the invitation. She added, too quickly, “If the trains aren’t running yet. We could—walk, I guess.”

Sloane’s look was softer than the light. “Sure,” she said. “I open at the gallery at noon, but the morning is big enough.”

They stepped back out under a sky that had decided to keep raining without drama. The station’s water tower loomed like a sentinel. The Ocotillo Motel was a two-story L-shape with doors that stuck in the frame and a soda machine that didn’t quite take your dollar all the way. Mr. Rojas sat at a desk that had been sanded by years. He had a paperback in Spanish and a pencil tucked behind the ear.

“You are the list lady,” he said as Mara came in. His voice was sanded too, to a smoothness. He slid the key across a map of the motel on a clipboard. “Room eight. It’s got the good view.”

“What’s the view?”

“The ice machine,” he said without smiling, then nodded toward the door like that was the punch line.

The room was clean in the way that happens when a person who cares about clean has only so much to work with. Thin carpet, a bedspread printed with anonymous leaves, a bathroom that grinned with white tile every time the light flickered. Mara set her bag down and the quiet fell with her. She texted Neil: Got a room. Back tomorrow, I think. Then, because she wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t perform for her own husband, she added: Met an old friend. It’s… bringing things up. I’ll call in the morning. She stared at the screen until the three dots appeared.

Neil: I’m here. Love you. Sleep if you can. Rain sounds can be a lullaby if you let them.

She turned off the light and lay in the dark listening to the rain drum on the metal railing outside, a rhythm like a hand tapping until it got its way. She tried to sleep the way you try to remember a word—too hard. Her mind hooked itself into old scars and picked. The time she’d rearranged Avery’s suitcase the night before a semester abroad because “rolling saves space.” The way Lucas had stopped telling her things around age fifteen, politely, kindly, as if one of them had outgrown the other. She could feel the outline of herself in all those moments: a precise woman with good reasons, a curator of outcomes.

She got up, poured water from the bathroom tap, drank it like penance, and sat at the little table by the window with her notebook. She turned to a fresh page.

To Do:
— email donors re: new matching timeline
— resched. site visit
— text Avery a picture of the rain? ask about her day (DON’T ADVISE)
— dinner order link for Neil (he will pick; let him)
— apologize to Lucas re: last week??? (figure out how)

The list was an anchor thrown at the sea. It held for a moment; then the storm rose over it. She flipped the page and wrote, without planning it:

Avery: I am sorry I send you plans instead of love. I know I do it because plans feel like love to me. But you are not me. When you told me you wanted to change majors, I felt scared and called it logic. I want to know what you want. I want to listen without translating. Will you help me learn how?

She sat back, startled by the neatness of her own handwriting. It looked like someone else had written it while she’d looked away.

Wind shouldered the window. Somewhere in the motel a TV laughed at a joke and then apologized for it. Mara turned off the lamp and lay down again. The rain called time on the day.

---

Morning was a coin flip that came up sun. The desert, rinsed, smelled like dust and green things and hot metal. The sky had forgotten how to be mean. Mara woke with the specific clarity of motel mornings: air you don’t own, light you can’t control, a day that arrives without your permission.

At the office, on mornings like this, she would already be two emails in, the machine humming because she’d made it. Here, the machine was a rusted ice maker that belched into the sunlight.

She showered in an outline of herself on the plastic curtain and stood for a full thirty seconds with the water beating the back of her neck. When she got out, she looked at her face in the fogged mirror and, for a tiny, unpleasant instant, didn’t recognize it. Not in the dramatic movie way. Just in the small way that happens when you catch a candid photo of yourself laughing and see someone else’s tooth shape. She leaned closer. The eyes were hers. The tiny white crescent scar under the right brow (bike accident, twelve) was hers. The mouth was a map she’d drawn herself.

She dressed in yesterday’s jeans and a fresh shirt from the bottom of the bag and went to the office to check the train status. Mr. Rojas looked up from his paperback and shook his head once.

“Crew says maybe tomorrow,” he said. “They got most of the mud off, but the wash can lie. It looks fine and then it isn’t.”

“The buses?”

“Road crew says the west road’s half-gone in places. They’re not sending big vehicles over it. Small cars, maybe. But that’s playing cards with the river.”

Mara blinked. Her week unspooled further, a bright ribbon dragging in the dust. “Okay,” she said, as if accepting terms in a negotiation.

“You do the kind of work where the world burns,” Mr. Rojas said conversationally, not looking up from his book. It wasn’t a question.

“Sometimes,” Mara said. “Mostly the kind where the burning is slow and polite.”

He turned a page. “When something burns slow, you can nap through it and wake up to ashes.”

“Do you practice those?” Mara asked, a smile tugging.

He looked up then, dark eyes with a kind of patient humor. “I got them on sale.”

Outside the office, Sloane leaned against the rail, a paper bag under one arm. She had sunglasses shallow enough to be useless and a grin that hadn’t yet decided what kind of day it would be.

“I brought provisions,” she said, lifting the bag. “Donuts that taste like they were made by someone named Earl and a thermos of coffee that would get a dead horse to file its taxes.”

They walked without saying where. The motel gave onto a stretch of two-lane road that ran straight until it changed its mind. A wash cut the landscape in a shallow wound. The water ran brown and fast, impatient as gossip. On the far side, the desert threw up its standard miracles: cholla with its secret arms, ocotillo like a sketch gone wild, a scatter of yellow wildflowers like the desert had a laugh after all.

“You live out here,” Mara said. “By choice.”

“By arithmetic,” Sloane said. “Choice is a fancy word for the math that gets you to rent paid plus a sliver of joy. But yes. I like the big sky. It doesn’t ask me to be smaller than I am.”

Mara thought about the offices she’d worked in that asked exactly that without saying it. She thought about the way she’d complied, graciously, and then built a different kind of power where she could. She didn’t say any of that. She said, “I don’t know what to do when I’m not doing something.”

Sloane passed her a donut without making a face at the sentence. “Try chewing,” she said, and started walking along the rail fence that kept cars from thinking they could fly.

They walked in that easy way you can with someone who used to know you in a different tense. They listed the names of dorm-mates they’d loved, professors who’d tried to date their own ideas and failed, meals that had become lore. The sun lifted. The day warmed. A hawk wrote something unreadable in the air.

“You ever regret not having kids?” Mara blurted, not because the question was good but because it was hot and she was empty of the small talk that usually saved her from real things.

Sloane took a long moment. “Sometimes, when I see a toddler go weightless on a shoulder,” she said finally. “Sometimes when I want a witness for an afternoon. But I don’t think I was built for the constellation of it—the attention, the patience, the way you have to be wider than yourself. I barely learned to be wider than a bottle of sauv blanc. What I regret is how long it took me to stop auditioning for my own life.”

Mara stopped. “What does that mean?”

“It means I kept trying to earn my role,” Sloane said. “In my own story. I kept waiting for somebody to hand me the lead. Turns out you have to decide you already have it. Everyone else is cast in their own thing. If you want them in yours, you have to invite them as they are.”

Mara felt that thin blade again in the ribs. She thought of all the times she had cast Neil as “supportive husband” and then been confused when he wanted to paint late into the night and leave the dishes till morning. Cast Avery as “intelligent daughter” and required her to deliver intelligence in ways that looked familiar. Cast Lucas as “quirky, bright son” and then edited out the scenes where he was simply a nineteen-year-old human animal in a too-small town.

“How did you stop auditioning?” she asked, though she knew the answer would not be a list.

Sloane shrugged. “Not all at once. Some days I still crouch at the edge of my own stage and wait for applause. But once you see the trick mirror, it stops working as well.”

They reached the edge of the wash and stood watching the water throw itself forward like it had someplace to be. The desert’s bright silence sat around them like a full bowl.

“It’s loud,” Mara said, surprised.

“It’s honest,” Sloane said.

Back at the motel, a cluster of stranded travelers sat on the long second-floor walkway like a weird little neighborhood. The guitarist had learned a song since last night that used the rain as percussion. The college kids were teaching the toddler how to fist-bump without knocking himself over. Nadia was off shift and barefoot, legs tucked under her, watching a video of a cat on a Roomba like it was pure cinema.

Mara stopped without meaning to and took in the scene as if it were a painting. People existed. They did not need her. They looked fine.

Inside her chest, a small animal paced, newly awake.

“You okay?” Sloane asked.

“I think so,” Mara said. “I don’t know. It’s like—I’m an amp turned all the way up but nobody’s plugged their guitar in.”

Sloane laughed, delighted. “That’s vivid.”

“It’s unpleasant,” Mara said, but she was smiling too.

Her phone buzzed. Avery: Glad you’re safe. Can call later?
Mara: Yes. I want to listen. You pick the time.
The dots appeared, vanished, returned. Okay, Avery wrote. That sounds good. Then, after a second: Love you.

It was such a small thing that it felt like nothing and everything. Mara put the phone away like it was a warm stone.

Mr. Rojas stepped out of the office to tape a handwritten note to the door: Tracks: maybe tomorrow. Road: don’t be stupid. Coffee: in the lobby, free. He saw Mara looking and lifted his hands. “I used to make fancier signs. People didn’t read those either.”

Mara laughed. “Can I help with anything?”

He considered. “You can take this coffee urn upstairs so no one breaks their neck coming down in wet slippers,” he said. “And you can remember to drink some yourself.”

She carried the urn up like a peace offering. People brought their own mismatched mugs and said thank you in the particular tone of strangers temporarily promoted to neighbors. The guitarist offered a half-song as currency. The toddler offered a grape. Mara poured coffee and felt something like quiet.

In the afternoon, the sun turned the white metal rails to lines of light. The air dried. You could almost hear the desert shrug off the storm and get back to its work of being relentless. Mara sat in the shade of the stairwell with Sloane and watched an ant carry a crumb ten times its size and thought, unironically, that it was heroic.

“I keep trying to have a revelation,” she said. “Like a big shining thing. And instead I have facts. They sit there. They don’t care if I’m ready.”

“Facts are useful,” Sloane said. “Revelations make for better essays.”

“Here are some facts,” Mara said, surprising herself with the way the words lined up without rehearsal. “I love my family. I do not listen well. I confuse agreement with connection. I’m afraid of being unnecessary. I would rather be right than be chosen. I am—” She stopped, breath coming fast like a person who had run up stairs. “I am lonely in the exact center of my life.”

Sloane didn’t rush to fill the space. She sipped the coffee Mr. Rojas had brewed strong enough to peel paint and then said, “That sounds like a person I would like to be friends with.”

Mara made a face. “The lonely person?”

“The honest person,” Sloane said. “Lonely changes. Honest sticks.”

They didn’t say anything for a while. The motel made motel noises. Someone’s TV reported a baseball score as if it mattered mid-storm. The desert made its big, indifferent music.

Toward evening, Mara walked down to the edge of the property where the chain-link fence leaned like it had an opinion and looked out at the distance. The sky was a patient, cloudless blue that promised nothing. She felt a tug to call Neil and narrate the day into a charming story—stranded in the middle of nowhere but made friends! rescued a toddler! learned a little something about myself!—and win the award for resilience. She didn’t. She called him and asked, “How was your day?”

He laughed softly, surprised. “It was… mine,” he said. “I taught a kid how to draw a hand that looked like a hand and not a bunch of sausages. I made a pot of chili and over-salted it and ate it anyway. I painted three chairs green and they are all different greens and that is fine. How was yours?”

“I think I told the truth a couple times,” she said. “It was weird.”

“I like weird if it’s you,” he said.

They let the line be quiet for a bit. He breathed. She breathed. The desert breathed, which is to say it didn’t.

After they hung up, Mara stood until the light faded to the kind of blue that makes shadows feel like doors. She thought of the notebook in her room with the letter to Avery in a new, careful script. She thought of Lucas, who used humor as a doorstop. She thought of the way Neil had said mine and meant it in a way that made her want to loosen something and let it go.

Night fell without any special effects. The desert, exhausted from drama, curled up and slept. Mara climbed the stairs to room eight, unlocked the door, and stepped into a space that smelled like detergent and old dust and her own damp hair. She lay on the bedspread with the anonymous leaves and looked at the ceiling and for the first time in a while didn’t ask the day to talk back.

She dreamed she was at a station where no trains stopped, holding a ticket to a place that was just a color. In the dream, she stood and waited. In the morning, she woke up still waiting, but also ready to walk.

End of Part I.