Run, Rose, Run(60)

She snorted. “Oh, okay, sure. You were just asleep the whole flight home, I guess.”

Of course he’d been faking, leaning back with his eyes closed and a Merle Haggard playlist on his iPhone. He hadn’t expected AnnieLee to fall for it, but he’d needed to be alone with his muddled thoughts and Merle’s hard-living anthems. And she’d played along and let him be.

Now, as the early fall air came rushing in through the window, he wasn’t any closer to figuring out how he felt about the trip, or his role as chaperone, or AnnieLee Keyes herself.

No, scratch that last part. He knew how he felt about AnnieLee; he just wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to feel it.

He thought about the guitar he’d built in his garage workshop, with its dark slender body and its neck polished so smooth it felt like satin. He’d made it for her; he could admit that now. But he didn’t know if it’d ever feel right to give it to her. It would be like handing her his heart.

“Hello?” AnnieLee said. “You’re definitely not asleep now, seeing as how you’re driving, so I don’t know why you still aren’t talking to me.”

He couldn’t help smiling. She was as funny as she was infuriating. “Fine. Tell me what you want me to say.”

“Now that would just defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it? If I told you the words that I wanted to hear?” AnnieLee asked. “But you seem to need help, so here goes. You could tell me what you thought of LA or give me your opinion on the hotel breakfast. Or you could explain why you’ve been ghosting me since the tea shop.”

Ethan flicked on his turn signal, glancing in the rearview mirror. As he moved into the right lane, suddenly there was a black pickup behind him, so close it was practically riding Ethan’s bumper.

“Whoops. Sorry, buddy,” he said reflexively. “Didn’t see you there.”

AnnieLee threw up her hands and stared in obvious annoyance out her window. “Won’t say boo to me, but he’ll talk to the dude behind us who can’t even hear him,” she muttered.

“He has good taste in trucks,” Ethan said. “The new F-150s are slick.” He accelerated a little and looked sideways at AnnieLee. “All right, if you really want to know what I was thinking, I’d say I thought the hotel pancakes were undercooked.”

“You’re so annoying,” AnnieLee said. But a smile flickered at the corner of her mouth.

“You’re one to talk,” he said.

But he didn’t know what to say next, and so they rode in silence for a while.

“I think I know why you’re so quiet,” AnnieLee finally said. “When you saw me in that dress, you were so stunned by my magnificence that it rendered you speechless for eighteen hours.”

“Bingo,” he said.

She was joking, yet in a way she wasn’t wrong. She’d taken his breath away when he saw her in the studio. But her beauty had been so burnished, so glittering and unfamiliar. It was as if, at that moment, he realized how little he really knew AnnieLee Keyes. And despite all the time they spent together, he wasn’t sure she’d ever let him get to know her better.

He turned on the radio, and Tim McGraw’s voice came faintly out of the truck’s old speakers. “Okay,” he finally said, “here’s what I was thinking. We see each other almost every day. We play music together. We’ve written lyrics together. But if I hadn’t been sitting in that café yesterday, I wouldn’t know any of that stuff about your life until I could read about it in a magazine. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

AnnieLee hesitated. “I think a lot of things are weird,” she said, glancing in her side-view mirror. “Like why this jerk in the truck won’t just pass us.”

At first Ethan was annoyed that she seemed to be changing the subject. But then he looked backward and saw the black truck still there, not exactly riding his bumper, but almost, and he knew it wasn’t right. Quickly, acting on instinct, he took the next exit off the highway. The truck followed, keeping a steady distance behind them.

Though Ethan couldn’t see any real reason to worry, the back of his neck began to tingle. Some deep, subconscious part of him sensed the presence of danger. In Afghanistan, where gunmen could be around any corner or roads could suddenly detonate, that part of him had helped keep him alive.

Ethan made a right past the 76 gas station and then took a left on the next road without even seeing what it was called. He slowed, and the black truck slowed, too. He made another left, and then a right. The truck stayed behind them, maybe a little closer now. He squinted into the rearview mirror. It wasn’t one of his friends messing with him, was it?

Whenever Ethan varied his speed, the black truck did, too; the same went for the turns. Whoever was driving certainly wasn’t trying to pretend that he wasn’t following them.

It couldn’t be one of his friends.

Ethan looked over at AnnieLee, pale and now silent. He thought of the night she was mugged, and the night that she was attacked outside the bar. And he understood, suddenly, that these events probably weren’t random after all. They were connected.

AnnieLee kept her eyes straight ahead, as if she knew what was happening but didn’t want to see it. She held tight to the door handle. Her knuckles were white.

“AnnieLee,” he said.