By the time June Mercer reached the gate, she had stopped thinking in terms of plans.
Plans belonged to people with gas in the tank, money in the glove compartment, and somebody left to call when the road failed them. June had none of those things. She had a fourteen-month-old boy asleep against her chest, a canvas duffel digging into her fingers, and two days of mountain walking in her bones.
The late-August air in the Appalachian hills clung to her skin like damp cloth.
Pine, creek water, red dirt, old iron. The road had narrowed mile by mile until it barely qualified as one anymore, just a scar of packed earth curling through trees so thick overhead they made a tunnel out of daylight. Somewhere behind her sat the rusted pickup she had coaxed across three states, dead on the shoulder with the fuel needle flat and the check engine light glowing like a last insult.
She had left it there because she had no choice, and choice had become a luxury in her life.
Ezra stirred against her collarbone, his small fingers twisted in the worn flannel shirt she wore over a tank top. The shirt had belonged to Travis. It still smelled faintly of cedar soap if she pressed her face into the fabric hard enough and lied to herself a little.
Travis had known rivers the way some men knew scripture.
He could read current, sky, and bank with one glance. Then a March flood had come harder and uglier than anyone expected, and the river had taken him like it had changed its mind about the world overnight. They found him days later caught in sycamore roots downstream, still wearing the clothes he had left in.
June buried him that way because there had been no time, and no extra money, and because grief sometimes arrives so hot it burns a person dry before tears ever get the chance.
She had not cried at the funeral.
Three days later her mother-in-law had set June’s bag on the porch and said, in a voice calm enough to be mistaken for kindness, “I can’t carry you and the baby too.”
June had not argued. She had learned a long time ago that begging someone who had already decided was just another way of bleeding in public.
So she had strapped Ezra into his car seat, pointed the old truck toward the last blood relative she had left, and driven through the night to Charleston. When she got there, the little house she remembered from childhood sat dark and padlocked.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
