She'd taken a taxi - a single taxi, the only one, driven by a man named Clem who seemed genuinely surprised to have a fare - the seventeen miles to Cedar Creek, watching the landscape open up around her in a way that felt geological, like the earth itself was making a point. The sky here was not decorative. It was structural. It held everything up and it filled everything in and it was the color of pewter and gold at four in the afternoon, layers of cloud and light that Chicago, with its skyline and its particular arrogance about being a city, would never have permitted. In Chicago the sky was a gap between buildings. Here the sky was the fact and the mountains were the punctuation.

Clem drove without conversation, which she appreciated. He had a pine-tree air freshener that spun gently from the rearview and a plastic tray on the dashboard with several Wyoming quarters in it, which she found unexpectedly comforting. Some rituals of car travel were universal. She looked out the window at the pastureland and the stands of cottonwood and the fences that ran ruler-straight for what appeared to be miles before vanishing over a rise, and she thought - the thought arrived before she could stop it - Derek would have hated this. And then, because that thought arrived with a particular small puncture of loss, she rearranged it into: Derek would never have come here. And then, because that was also true and freeing in a way she wasn't quite ready to feel fully yet: I am here and he is not and this is possibly fine.

Clem deposited her on what he called Main Street with what seemed to Joanna like unseemly haste and drove away before she could ask him to wait.

She stood on the sidewalk - concrete for half a block, then gravel, then packed earth - and looked at Cedar Creek.

Population: 1,200, according to the sign she'd passed coming in. One main street, as advertised: a hardware store, a diner, a pharmacy, a small grocery, a gas station with a single pump, a building that might be a bank or might be a post office or might be both, and a café on the far end with a hand-painted sign she couldn't read from here. Three pickups were parked at angles along the street, nose-in to the sidewalk like horses at a rail. An older woman in a canvas jacket was carrying what appeared to be a rooster under one arm, walking with great purpose toward the hardware store. Nobody else was visible.

The rooster did not appear distressed. This seemed, in the moment, like a reasonable indicator that Cedar Creek was the kind of town where you could carry a rooster down the main street without causing social friction, and Joanna filed this information under things that are different here and started thinking about what she was supposed to do next.

She had, as best she could reconstruct it, made the following sequence of decisions: she had boarded what she believed to be the Chicago-to-Louisville train, intending to visit her parents and accept the temporary comfort of her mother's kitchen and the two-or-three well-meaning blind dates that her parents would have arranged by the time she arrived, because her mother's love language was logistics and a crisis was a logistics problem to be solved through the strategic deployment of available single men. She had sat in her assigned seat, 14C, and she had been asleep before the train left the station, which told her more about the state of her nervous system than she wanted to know. She had woken up in Wyoming. This was not, she had come to understand, entirely Layla Nolan's fault, though Layla - who had apparently asked Joanna if she could swap tickets, Amtrak being what it was, and had received some kind of automatic or sleepy assent from Joanna who didn't remember any of it - was going to receive a text about this when she had cell service.

She looked at her roller suitcase, which had four wheels and was designed for marble floors and airport terminals. She looked at the gravel shoulder of the road she would need to traverse to find - she had an address, somewhere, that Layla had scribbled on the back of a gas station receipt; she dug in her purse, found it - Frank and Ruth Morrow's property, which was apparently on something called the Elk Ridge Road. Layla had written, in the corner of the receipt in handwriting that was evidently done in a hurry: they're good people, you'll like them, just knock and say you're Layla's friend.

She had no idea where Elk Ridge Road was.

She had no cell service. The single bar on her phone had blinked out somewhere around the county line.

She looked at the diner. She looked at the hardware store. She looked at the café at the far end of the block with the unreadable sign. There was a logic to small towns - she had grown up in a smallish suburban town in Indiana before she was seventeen and went to Northwestern on early admission - and the logic was that someone always knew where the road you needed was, and they would tell you without making you feel foolish for not knowing, because everyone had started by not knowing.

She picked up her suitcase by the handle and began to walk.