Broken Wings (A Romantic Suspense)(60)

Thing is, it’s like we don’t even need to talk. Ellie leans over on my shoulder and her eyes grow lidded, but she’s not asleep. With a long stretch of highway ahead of us with no curves, I’m glad she does.

As the day grows older the sun eases up and I can finally roll up my window.

“Think we’ll see any aliens?”

“What?”

“My uncle thinks there’s aliens up here, up at that secret air force base.”

“How is it a secret if everybody knows about it?”

“Good question.”

“You mean Area 51, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, clearly Area 51 is fake, and all the real shit is at Area 52 where nobody bothers looking, you know?”

Ellie laughs and sits up. “How much farther?”

“We’ll be in Los Angeles soon. We’ll stay on the highway. It’s better to not stop.”

She shifts in the seat and sits up to better look around. It’s still desert out here but the city is there in the distance, hazed out, rippled like we’re looking at it through an aquarium. The sky is a little heavier and grayer and it grows smaller as suburban sprawl starts popping up around the highway.

After another hour or so, I guess we’re in the city. I’m used to New York and Philadelphia—lots of building up, not out. Here everything is fairly low, with a distant core of skyscrapers we’re not even going to pass through, looming on the horizon like some mythical realm.

Ellie sits there and stares quietly, soaking it all in. How strange it must be for her to see such massive things, such wide-open places after spending years and years locking herself up in her room.

“I feel small,” she says.

“Yeah, me too.”

“What was it like, traveling the world? Seeing so many things?”

I frown. “It was… I’d have gotten more out of it if I wasn’t so focused on what I didn’t have. I saw things you wouldn’t believe. Especially in the service. Funny shit, horrifying shit, depressing shit. It was mostly boring, though. I made coffee in tents.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I could have been anywhere and it would be a burden because you weren’t with me. I want to go back to some of those places, now. With you. You need to see Europe.”

“Alright,” she says without missing a beat.

“Any place you’d like to go?”

“London. Paris. Venice. Madrid. Some places in the country, too. The south of France. The Riviera.”

“Ambitious.”

“I have a lot of lost time to make up for.”

“Me, too. We’re almost there, honey.”

“Think we’ll make the sunset?”

“Yeah.”





Ellie





The trees here are strange.

I wasn’t expecting to drive through a forest, even a scrub forest with low trees and sandy soil. My mental image of southern California was always either desert or city, no greenery. It’s fall now and leaves have fallen, but there is so much nature here.

I’m not sure where we are. This is all just a blue line on the map app to me. I soak in the details, turning and twisting in my seat.

Then we round a curve. The road swells up, swinging out over the edge of a cliff. I should get the willies from having nothing between us and the drop but a guardrail, but I barely even register it.

I see it. The Pacific Ocean. It glitters like a vast jewel, sunlight pooling between the waves. The sun will be down in an hour or two and already grows huge on the horizon. It suddenly registers to me how strange it is to see the sun going down in the ocean rather than over my shoulder as I look at it.

The last time I went to the beach I was a little girl and my father was there. We went to the Jersey Shore a few times but my dad loved Rehoboth Beach down in Delaware the most. For some reason, we stopped going when I was eight or nine, around the time my father remarried.

I can’t stop staring at the water. Why does it look different? Is it the angle of the sun? Jack only glances at it a few times.

Our route takes us out of the forest and into Malibu, the city. For some reason I start to feel butterflies in my stomach as we stop at red lights and finally turn off the coastal highway toward the beach itself.

The ocean reaches out farther and farther ahead, all the way to the edge of the world. It’s cold and rain clouds hang above, threatening. The beach is deserted, and so pale. I’m used to beaches that look like ashtrays and shrink every year. This beach is huge, the sand so clean and bright it looks almost like snow, the water line strangely distant. Jack takes my hand and we walk down a boardwalk to a staircase, and then out onto the sands.

I start to shiver, but I don’t care. I can taste sea salt on my tongue. The air is heavy with it. The water rolls up in big, strong waves, crashing hard on the sand before drawing back and doing it again. The foam curls up like the tongues of sea serpents, and in the distance the waves rise and fall and catch sunlight between them, like hands grasping water from a spring cupped between them.

I forget myself and bolt down the sand. Jack yells something and runs after me, but by the time he catches me the surprisingly warm water is lapping up over my calves. I kicked my shoes off before I reached the water and hiked up my pant legs, and now the water rolls in and swirls around them. Wet sand squishes between my toes.