Aubrey's POV
"Last call for Route 47 to Millbrook," the station attendant announces, and I watch the final passengers shuffle toward the bus.
I am one of them now.
The duffel bag weighs heavy against my shoulder as I join the line. My resignation letter is already sitting on Finn's desk along with a note I rewrote four times before the words stopped feeling like lies.
'Thank you for giving me courage. I'm sorry I couldn't say goodbye properly. Please don't look for me.'
The day stretched like taffy, every minute pulling longer than it has to. I knew his schedule by heart—the Alderton presentation at nine, the board meeting at eleven, the investor calls that would chain him to conference rooms until evening.
I waited in the break room with my bag hidden under my desk, watching the clock tick past noon, past two, past four.
"You getting on or not, honey?" The woman behind me nudges my elbow impatiently. "Some of us have lives to get back to."
"Sorry." I step forward and hand my ticket to the driver, a barrel-chested man with a gray mustache. "I'm getting on."
He tears my stub and gestures toward the aisle. "Find a seat quick, we're already running behind."
The bus seats are upholstered in that scratchy blue fabric designed to hide decades of spills and wear, the pattern so aggressively geometric it makes my eyes ache.
I slide into an empty row near the middle and press my forehead against the cool glass, feeling the vibration of the idling engine travel through my skull. The station platform shrinks as we pull away from the curb.
"Long trip ahead?" The elderly woman across the aisle peers at me over wire-rimmed glasses, her knitting needles clicking in a steady rhythm. "You have that look about you, dear. Like you're not sure if you want the bus to go faster or slower."
"Honestly, I don't know what I want right now," I say, and the honesty surprises me.
"Nobody ever does on these routes, honey." She counts her stitches, lips moving silently. "I took this same bus out of Chicago back in '84. Cried the whole way. Worked out eventually. Most things do, if you give them enough time."
"How did you know it was the right choice?"
"I didn't." Her needles pause, and she looks at me with eyes that have seen enough to stop being surprised by anything. "You never know if you're making the right choice until you're on the other side of it."
The bus merges onto the highway, and I watch the skyline recede through the window.
Somewhere in that maze of glass and steel, Finn is sitting in a conference room, unaware that I am already gone. By the time he finds my letter, I will be hours away, swallowed by the same small town I spent my whole childhood trying to escape.
The irony does not escape me.
"You're awfully quiet over there." The woman looks up from her knitting. "Head full of noise?"
"You could say that."
"Want to talk about it, or you want me to mind my business?" She asks it plainly, without offense either way.
"I don't even know where I'd start…" I exhale, shaking my head slightly with a smile.
But then I'm talking anyway, the words spilling out like I've been holding them too long.
"I just quit my job. Left a note for a man who wanted to help me because I was too scared to say goodbye to his face. I'm pregnant, and the baby's father is someone I need to get far away from. He wasn't… kind to me."
The understatement of the century.
Wasn't kind covers the fingerprints on my throat the way foundation covers bruises. Technically accurate, fundamentally dishonest.
"And now I'm going back to the trailer park I grew up in, because it's the only place I have left."
I hear my words the way a stranger might. Trailer park. Pregnant. Running. My mother's life, playing out again in her daughter like some cruel genetic inheritance I never asked for.
The cycle continues.
I spent eighteen years watching my mother stretch grocery money and patch screen doors and pretend she didn't cry in the bathroom when she thought I was asleep.
I swore I would be different. I would escape. I would build something that looked nothing like the single-wide with the leaky roof and the neighbors who screamed at each other through paper-thin walls.
And here I am.
Pregnant, broke, and riding a bus back to the exact coordinates I fled.
The woman's expression doesn't shift by a single degree. "Sounds like you've had a rough time."
"That's one way to put it."
"And this man, the one who wanted to help—he's not the father?"
"No. He's..." I trail off, not sure how to explain Finn. "He's someone I should have stayed away from. Someone too good for the mess I'm in."
Someone who will forget me in six months and marry and never think about the girl from the trailer park who kissed him once and ran.
"Mhm." She doesn't argue with me, which I appreciate. "Well. You're getting yourself out. That counts for something."
"Does it?"
My mother thought she got herself out too and she still ended up alone in Millbrook, raising a daughter who repeated every mistake she tried to warn me against.
"It's more than a lot of people manage." Her needles resume their rhythm. "The rest you'll figure out when you get there, honey."
I turn back to the window and watch the city disappear behind us, replaced by stretches of farmland that roll toward the horizon like green waves frozen mid-crest.
I run through the list in my head, forcing my thoughts into practical channels.
File for divorce first thing Monday morning.
Contact Dr. Morrison at the women's clinic—she delivered half the babies in Millbrook when I was growing up, and she'll remember me.
Find a job, any job, something that pays enough to cover trailer rent and groceries and the endless list of things a baby needs.
Find a trailer. Make it a home. Raise my child in the same kind of place my mother raised me, and pray that love is enough to fill in the gaps where money falls short.
It doesn't sound so terrible anymore. After Daniel, nothing seems terrible.
The fields blur past the window, gold and green bleeding together at the edges of my vision. My eyelids grow heavy as the elderly woman's knitting needles click in a rhythm that sounds almost like a lullaby, and I let myself drift toward sleep.
Then the screech of tires tears through the quiet.
My body jerks forward, seatbelt cutting into my chest as the bus lurches to a violent stop. The woman's yarn tumbles from her lap, rolling down the aisle in a trail of blue wool, and somewhere behind me a child starts to cry.
"What the hell!" The driver slams his palm against the steering wheel. "Are you out of your goddamn mind? Get that car out of the road before I call the cops on your sorry ass!"
I crane my neck toward the windshield, trying to see what caused the sudden stop. A black G-class sits sideways across both lanes, its driver's door hanging open.
The bus doors hiss and fold inward.
Footsteps pound up the stairs, and a figure appears in the aisle—tall, broad-shouldered, breathing hard like he has been running. His dark brown hair is disheveled, his suit jacket missing and tie loosened and hanging crooked against his chest.
My heart stops while Finn's gaze tears through the bus, row by row, seat by seat.
He stands frozen for half a second, his wild eyes raking across the passengers and the fury that rolling off him is unlike anything I have ever witnessed. He hasn't spotted me yet, but his voice finds me anyway.
"Aubrey Novak, step out of the damn bus RIGHT NOW!"