They drove in silence for the first three hours.
The SUV hummed along I-90, heading west through upstate New York. The landscape was flat and repetitive—trees, fields, the occasional town that existed only to be passed through. Sarah kept her hands on the wheel at ten and two. James stared out the window, watching the world move past.
He was thinking about Cornell. He'd gotten an email that morning—a preliminary callback. They wanted to interview him. They liked his cover letter. They thought he might be a good fit.
It was almost funny how quickly things could change. Three weeks ago, he was convinced he didn't deserve to exist. Now he had a job interview and a future that suddenly seemed possible.
"You're thinking about something," Sarah said. It wasn't a question.
"The job," James replied. "Cornell called. They want to interview me."
"That's good," Sarah said. She kept her eyes on the road. "Are you going to do it?"
"I don't know," James said. "We're driving west. I don't know where we're going or how long we'll be gone."
"We can figure that out," Sarah said. "We can plan the interview around the drive. Or we can turn around. Or we can do something else entirely."
James thought about this. The old James—the one from a few weeks ago—would have said they should turn around. Would have said that running and then running back was the same as never running at all.
But something had shifted in him. Something about Sarah's confrontation on the porch, something about applying for the job despite feeling like he didn't deserve it, something about Marcus leaving and showing James that you could make a choice for yourself without it being a betrayal.
"I want to keep going," James said. "For now. I want to see where this ends up."
"Okay," Sarah said. She didn't ask where "this" was. She just accepted the ambiguity and kept driving.
They stopped for lunch in Pennsylvania.
A rest stop with a McDonald's and a gift shop and bathrooms that smelled like industrial cleaner. They got food they didn't really want and sat at a plastic table in a plastic booth watching other travelers move through the space.
"I keep thinking about Marcus," Sarah said. "I keep wondering if he's okay. If he and David are having fun. If he regrets leaving."
"Probably all of those things," James said.
"I'm not angry at him anymore," Sarah continued. "I was, this morning. But now I think... he was right. We were dying there. We were comfortable in our dying, but we were still dying."
"Are we alive now?" James asked.
Sarah considered this. "I don't know yet. Ask me when we get to the coast."
"What if we don't get to the coast?" James asked. "What if we just keep driving and never arrive anywhere?"
"Then at least we'll be moving," Sarah replied.
The weather started to change around 2 PM.
The sky, which had been a clear spring blue, began to darken. Clouds rolled in from the west with unusual speed. The radio issued increasingly urgent weather reports. A massive low-pressure system was moving across the central United States. Flash flood warnings. Possible tornadoes. Severe thunderstorm watches.
"We should find a place to wait this out," Sarah said.
"How bad is it?" James asked.
"Bad enough. Look at the sky."
James looked. The clouds were moving fast, organizing themselves into patterns that suggested violence. The wind was already starting to hit the SUV, making it shift slightly in its lane.
"Next town," James said. "We stop and find a hotel."
They found a Hyatt Place outside Provo, Utah.
It had taken them longer than expected to get that far—they'd stopped in Ohio overnight, then pressed through Indiana and Illinois. The weather had chased them the entire way. Not a wall of water, but a persistent rain that made visibility difficult and driving treacherous.
Now, as they pulled into the hotel parking lot, the storm was at its worst. Wind came in sideways. Rain fell in sheets. Other travelers were standing in the lobby looking shell-shocked, all of them having made the same decision to shelter.
"We made it," Sarah said, pulling into a covered spot.
"Yeah," James agreed. "We did."
They checked in. Two rooms, even though James suspected neither of them wanted to be alone. But it was easier this way—easier to maintain the fiction that they were still figuring things out rather than already committed to whatever this was becoming.
That evening, James stood at his window and watched the storm.
The weather service was calling it historic. The worst system in twenty years for the region. Flash floods were being reported throughout the valley. Highways were closing. The warning was that nobody should travel until the system passed through.
But it would pass through. Everything passed through. Storms. Jobs. Marriages. Friendships. People. Everything was temporary. Everything was in motion.
There was something oddly comforting about that.
A knock on his door.
Sarah stood there in sweatpants and a t-shirt, looking small and tired.
"Can I come in?" she asked.
"Of course," James said.
She sat on the edge of his bed while he returned to the window. They sat in silence for a long time, watching the storm.
"I've been thinking about something," Sarah said eventually. "Something about running."
"What?" James asked.
"I think we've been running from things," Sarah said. "The divorce. The job loss. The feeling that we were failures. But I don't think we've been running toward anything. And I'm wondering if that's the problem. If you're just running away, you end up in the same place eventually. But if you're running toward something..."
"Then maybe you end up somewhere different," James finished.
"Yeah," Sarah said. "Something like that."
"What are we running toward?" James asked.
Sarah looked at him. "I don't know yet. But I know I don't want to run alone. And I know I don't want you to disappear. And I know that Marcus leaving wasn't the end—it was just the next thing."
James understood what she was saying. He understood that in a few days, when the storm passed, they would drive again. They would figure out what came next. They would interview at Cornell or not. They would go to California or stay in Utah or go to Emily in Idaho or do something completely unexpected.
The future was still uncertain. But it was uncertain together, which felt like enough.
"Okay," James said. "Let's keep going."
Sarah nodded. She was quiet for a moment, then: "Do you think Blake is out there somewhere? Do you think he's still thinking about you?"
The question caught James off guard. He'd managed to avoid thinking about Blake for the past week. It felt safer that way.
"I don't know," James said honestly. "Probably not. It was a long time ago. He's probably moved on. Built a new life."
"You don't really believe that," Sarah said.
"No," James admitted. "I don't. I think Blake is probably still thinking about what I did. I think he probably hates me. But I don't think there's anything I can do about that."
Sarah nodded like this made sense. "Well, if he shows up, we'll deal with it."
"How would we deal with that?" James asked.
"I don't know," Sarah said. "Carefully."
She left after that, going back to her own room. James returned to the window and watched the storm continue its work of transformation.
Outside, lightning split the sky. Thunder shook the hotel walls. Rain fell like judgment.
But inside, James felt something like peace. Not the absence of fear, but the acceptance that fear was part of living. That mistakes had consequences. That people he'd harmed might still be out there, thinking about him.
But that didn't mean his life was over. It just meant his life was complicated. Which it always had been. He'd just finally admitted it.
The storm raged through the night.
By morning, it would begin to pass. The roads would start to clear. James and Sarah would wake up and decide what came next. They would eat breakfast in the hotel and watch the rain and gradually understand that they were going to be okay.
But they didn't know that yet.
For now, they just waited for the storm to end, knowing that storms always did.