the road the way you know something that marked you — not from conscious memory but from the body, from some deeper accounting that doesn’t go away when you decide to stop thinking about it.
She wanted to turn around.
She didn’t.
She told herself later that she had stayed because the alternative would have been to confirm that the road still had that power over her. But the honest version was simpler: she was fifty years old and she had spent half that life rearranging her routes, and she was tired of it.
Twenty miles in, the back tire blew.
She pulled onto the shoulder. She sat with both hands locked on the wheel and cried with the hard, ugly totality of someone who has been holding something at arm’s length for an extended period and has just been pushed past the point of managing it. Not about the tire.
