The Trestle Bridge receded in the rearview mirror, shrinking from a monolith of iron and history into a black scar against the gray sky.
I didn’t look back to see if Julian was still standing there. I knew he was. He was a statue carved from the same bedrock as the town, immovable and permanent. He belonged to the fog, to the river, to the ghosts that needed a keeper.
But I didn’t.
I pressed my foot down on the accelerator. The truck—Julian’s truck, which he had legally transferred to me an hour ago with a scribbled bill of sale on a diner napkin—surged forward. The engine roared, a rough, mechanical sound that felt like a shout of defiance.
The road out of Oakhaven was a corkscrew of asphalt that climbed the steep walls of the valley. It was the same road I had driven down a week ago, terrified and armored in my city cynicism. But the geometry felt different now. Going down had felt like falling. Going up felt like clawing my way out of a grave.
I rolled the window down. The air rushing in was still cold, still damp with the breath of the rainforest, but the smell was changing. The cloying sweetness of rot and the sharp tang of ozone were fading, replaced by the scent of pine resin baking in the anticipation of heat.
I drove past the marker for the city limits.
YOU ARE LEAVING OAKHAVEN. COME BACK SOON.
The sign was shot full of holes, the metal rusted around the jagged edges.
“Not in this lifetime,” I whispered.
My voice sounded strange in the cab. Steady. The tremor that had lived in my throat since I found the blue envelope was gone.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the river stone. The one Elias had given me in the library. The one that had been my “ring” for a wedding that never happened.
It was warm from my body heat. smooth. Heavy.
I slowed the truck as I rounded a hairpin turn overlooking the gorge. Below me, the treetops formed a carpet of dark green velvet, hiding the scars of the logging camps, the ruins of the mill, and the fresh earth of the graves we had filled.
I rolled the stone in my fingers.
I could keep it. I could put it in a box on my dresser in Seattle, a memento of the boy who saved me and the monster who tried to keep me. I could let it be a paperweight for my next article, a heavy reminder of the cost of truth.
But memories are heavy enough. I didn’t need to carry the geology of this place with me.
I tossed the stone out the window.
It arced through the air, a small gray blur against the vastness of the ravine, and vanished into the canopy below. It made no sound. It just returned to the earth.
“Goodbye, Elias,” I said.
I didn’t say it with anger. The anger had burned out in the fire at the sawmill. I didn’t say it with fear. The fear had died when I pulled the trigger. I said it with a profound, aching pity for the boy who had loved me so much he forgot how to be human.
I shifted gears and accelerated again.
The road straightened out as the elevation climbed. The trees began to thin. The towering Douglas firs, ancient and suffocating, gave way to younger pines and scrub oak. The light quality shifted from the diffuse, shadowless gray of the Shroud to something sharper.
And then, I hit the thermal layer.
It was a physical sensation, a popping in my ears as the pressure changed.
The fog didn’t just fade; it broke.
One moment, I was driving through wisps of white vapor that licked at the windshield like ghosts. The next, the truck punched through the ceiling of the cloud layer.
The sun hit me like a hammer.
It was blinding. Brilliant. A gold so pure it felt violent. I squinted, fumbling for the visor, flipping it down to shield my eyes.
The sky above was a shocking, impossible blue. Not the pale, watered-down blue of a coastal winter, but the deep, vibrant azure of the upper atmosphere.
I laughed.
It was a rusty sound, unused to the light.
“It’s sunny,” I said aloud, giggling like a child. “It was sunny the whole time.”
Below the cloud deck, Oakhaven was drowning in eternal twilight. But up here, the world was burning with life. The contrast was so stark it made my chest ache. We had spent so long fighting in the dark, we had forgotten the sun was just a few thousand feet above our heads.
I rolled the window down further, letting the wind whip my hair across my face. It was warm.
I turned on the radio.
For the last week, the only thing I could pick up was the local AM station that played scratchy country and hog reports, or the police scanner that chronicled the town’s slow collapse.
Now, the scan button landed on a clear, strong signal from Seattle. Pop music. A song with a synth beat and inane lyrics about dancing until the world ended.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. My fingernails were still ragged, bitten down to the quick during the long nights in the motel, but the dirt was gone. The red clay was scrubbed from my skin.
I looked at my hands. They were steady.
They were the hands of a woman who had dug up her past and buried it again, properly this time. Not in a shallow grave covered with ivy, but deep, under layers of forgiveness and finality.
I wasn’t the Ice Queen anymore. I wasn’t the Princess in the tower.
I glanced at the passenger seat. It was empty.
For years, I had driven with the ghost of my trauma riding shotgun. A shadow in the peripheral vision. A weight that made the suspension sag.
Today, the seat was just vinyl and dust motes dancing in the sunbeams.
I reached over and opened the glove box. Julian had left the registration and insurance papers there, along with a note.
I pulled the note out. It was written on the back of a speeding ticket.
Drive fast. Don’t look back. - J
I smiled, tucking the paper into my pocket. I would keep that. That wasn’t a rock; that was a wing.
The road flattened out, merging onto the interstate. The speedometer climbed to seventy. The world sped up. Cars passed me, flashes of red and silver, people going to jobs, to families, to lives that didn’t involve murder dolls or root cellars.
I was rejoining the stream of humanity.
I checked the rearview mirror to merge.
I saw my own eyes staring back.
For fifteen years, I had avoided mirrors. I used them to apply mascara or check my teeth, but I never lingered. I never looked deep, because I was afraid of seeing the scared little girl looking back. I was afraid of seeing the darkness of the coal cellar reflected in my pupils.
I looked now.
The dark circles were fading. The tension lines around my mouth had softened. There was a bruise on my cheekbone, turning a spectacular shade of yellow-green, and a small cut on my forehead from the glass shards at the mill.
I looked like I had been in a fight.
And I had won.
The woman in the mirror wasn’t fragile. She wasn’t made of glass. She was made of scar tissue and bone and survival.
A song came on the radio—something old, something reckless. I turned the volume up until the bass vibrated in the door panels.
I watched the woman in the mirror.
Her lips curled up.
It wasn’t the polite, practiced smile I used for interviews. It wasn’t the brittle, defensive smirk I used to arm myself against the world.
It was a real smile. It reached my eyes, crinkling the corners. It was wild and a little bit dangerous and entirely mine.
“Okay, Elara,” I said to my reflection. “What’s next?”
The road stretched out ahead, a ribbon of possibility leading to a skyline of glass and steel that I no longer feared. Seattle wasn’t a hiding place anymore. It was just a city. And I was just a journalist with a hell of a story to write.
Not the story of the Sandman. I would never write that. That story belonged to Oakhaven.
I was going to write the story of the girl who walked into the woods and walked back out.
I rolled the window up as the speed picked up, shutting out the wind but keeping the light. The truck hummed beneath me.
I was driving away from the nightmare, but I wasn’t forgetting it. I was integrating it. The fear, the pain, the loss—it was all fuel now. It was the gasoline in the tank.
I glanced at the mirror one last time, winking at the survivor staring back.
Then I turned my eyes to the road, shifted into high gear, and drove into the sun.