Chapter 15: Nevada

Nevada was desert and silence and the specific quality of a landscape that had nothing to prove. They drove with the windows down for two hours, not talking much, music low — a playlist Jess had made that Danny recognized as songs from college, from their years of shared playlists and borrowed headphones and the specific intimacy of music shared between people who understand what each other is saying by what they choose to play. 'You kept the playlist,' he said. 'I kept most things,' she said. 'I just pretended I hadn't.' They stopped at a gas station somewhere in the middle distance and stood in the heat of a Nevada afternoon with ice cream from a cooler that cost three dollars each, and Jess thought: this is the kind of moment you only recognize later. The kind that seems ordinary and is not. 'What happens when we get to California?' she asked. 'We get there.' 'And then?' 'Then we figure out what next.' He looked at her steadily. 'I don't think this is a road-trip thing, Jess. I don't think it ends when the trip ends. Do you?' She thought about five years of strategic distance. About knowing his favorite apple pie order. About a playlist she'd never deleted. 'No,' she said. 'I don't.' The desert was very quiet around them, wide and old and entirely unconcerned with the small human business of two people deciding something. They ate their ice cream in the heat and got back in the car, and the distance to California got shorter with every mile, and Jess found that for the first time in five years, she was not calculating her exit.