Page 27 of Joker

I turn my face back toward the window before he can catch me looking.

A few more quiet miles pass before he speaks again. “You can sleep if you want.”

The offer surprises me enough that I glance at him. “I’m okay.”

“You don’t look okay.”

There’s no cruelty in it. No challenge. Just observation.

I should probably be offended. Instead, I let out a tired breath and say, “That’s because I haven’t been okay in a while.”

The words slip out before I can stop them. For half a second, I wish I could pull them back. Not because they’re untrue. Because I don’t know what to do with the fact that I said them aloud to a man I barely know.

Joker doesn’t pounce on it. Doesn’t ask what happened or why or how bad it got. He just nods once like he heard me and leaves it there.

That should not feel as kind as it does.

I shift deeper into the seat, the sweatshirt swallowing me whole, and glance back at Lexi.

She’s still asleep, her face turned toward the window, Bunny trapped tight in her arms. Her little mouth is slightly open, her lashes dark against her cheeks, and one of her shoes has come half untied from where she must’ve been kicking her feet before she passed out.

I stare at her for a long second. Then I look forward again and realize something slowly, carefully, like my body is afraid to believe it too fast.

For the first time in weeks, I’m not carrying all of it alone.

Not the route. Not the vigilance. Not the constant, grinding expectation of danger pressing against the back of my skull.

Some of it is sitting in the driver’s seat beside me, broad shoulders filling the dark cab of the truck, eyes moving betweenthe road and the mirrors like he’s already decided that whatever is chasing us will have to go through him first.

I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what to do with him.

But somewhere between Louisiana and whatever comes next, with my daughter asleep in the backseat and a stranger’s sweatshirt wrapped around my body like borrowed armor, I feel something I haven’t felt in so long it almost doesn’t register at first.

Not safety.

Not yet.

But maybe the first edge of it.

And for right now, in the middle of this dark road with nowhere to go but forward, that is enough.

By the time we’re a couple hours into the drive, the truck has settled into its own kind of rhythm.

The engine hums low beneath us, steady enough to disappear into the background if I let it. The tires eat up mile after mile of dark highway while the headlights carve two pale lanes through the night. Every now and then another car passes in the opposite direction, a brief wash of white across the windshield, then nothing but darkness again. The road has mostly emptied out by now, which is exactly how I want it. Fewer eyes. Fewer chances for somebody to remember a truck, a face, a woman in a bad wig.

Lexi is still asleep in the backseat.

That kid went down quick and stayed down, curled around that stuffed bunny like it’s the one thing in the world she trusts not to change on her. Every now and then I glance in the mirror and catch the top of her head tilted toward the window, one small hand still locked around one floppy rabbit ear. She hasn’t moved much except to tuck deeper into herself when we hit rough patches in the road. The bunny stays right where it is every time. Security blanket, plain as day.

Makes sense.

Kids her age don’t have a lot of ways to make themselves feel safe. They latch onto routines, objects, sounds, people. Anything predictable. Anything that stays the same when the rest of the world won’t hold still.

That rabbit has probably been all four.

Beside me, Raven is talking more now.

Not a lot. Not enough to call it comfortable. But the silence between us has eased into something less brittle. We’ve gone from awkward strangers trapped in the same cab to something a little stranger than that. There’s a weird intimacy that comes with being shut inside a moving vehicle with somebody for hours while the rest of the world drops away outside the windows. No place to go. No clean escape from each other. Just darkness, road, and whatever conversation manages to survive in the space between.