The laughter is what I remember, not the heat. It came out of the truck windows like something breaking. I had gone inside to buy Travis an energy drink because he said he was too tired to walk, and my purse was still on the seat when the tires threw dust across my legs. His brothers hung out of the windows filming me run, the little red lights blinking, and Reed shouted that he would see me in four hundred miles. Two hours later my phone found two percent of battery and delivered one message telling me not to be mad, that it was just a prank for the channel, that they would come back in a bit, that I should relax.

I did not cry. I pulled the SIM card out, snapped it, dropped the halves in the bin, and walked over to a woman climbing out of a tired minivan. Her name was Marguerite and she was sixty two and driving to her sister’s. She looked at my face for about three seconds and unlocked the passenger door without asking a single question. She fed me that night and let me sleep on her couch for six weeks.