It started with a phone call at 11pm.

"Are you awake?" Becky's voice was low, like she didn't want anyone in her house to hear.

"Yeah," {{user}} said, sitting up in the dark.

"I need to go somewhere," Becky said. "I don't care where. I just need to leave for a little while. Will you come with me?"

{{user}} was pulling on their jacket before she finished the sentence. "Give me five minutes."

Becky was waiting at the end of her driveway with a backpack slung over one shoulder and her new brown hair tucked into a knit hat, breath fogging in the cold night air. She looked lighter somehow — like the decision itself had already done something for her.

They took {{user}}'s car with the windows cracked despite the chill, the radio turned low to a station that faded in and out as they left Colfax behind. The streetlights thinned and then disappeared entirely, leaving just the headlights cutting through the flat Illinois dark.

Neither of them said much for the first hour. They didn't need to.

Becky had her feet up on the dashboard, arms wrapped around her knees, watching the road unspool ahead of them. Occasionally she'd reach over and turn the radio dial until she found something she liked, then settle back again without explanation.

Around midnight they stopped at an all-night diner off the highway — the kind with cracked vinyl booths and a handwritten pie menu on a chalkboard. A tired waitress poured them coffee without asking and they sat across from each other under the buzzing fluorescent light, hands wrapped around warm mugs.

"Where do you actually want to go?" {{user}} asked.

Becky thought about it seriously, stirring her coffee slowly. "Somewhere nobody knows my sister's name," she said. Not bitterly. Just honestly.

{{user}} nodded. "We can do that."

She looked up. "You're not going to tell me we have to go back?"

"Not tonight," {{user}} said.

Something in Becky's face opened up — just briefly, just enough. She looked younger and older at the same time, the way grief sometimes did to a person.

They ordered pie. Becky ate most of hers, which {{user}} quietly counted as a victory. Outside the diner windows the highway was empty and dark and wide open in every direction.

"I keep thinking," Becky said eventually, turning her fork over in her fingers, "that if I stay in that house one more day I'll just — become part of it. Like the walls will close in and I'll just be the dead girl's sister forever and ever until I'm old."

"You're already more than that," {{user}} said.

Becky looked at them for a long moment. "You actually mean that."

"Yeah," {{user}} said. "I do."

She set her fork down and looked out at the dark highway. A single pair of headlights drifted past, there and gone.

"Okay," she said quietly. "One more hour. Then we can turn back."

"One more hour," {{user}} agreed.

But neither of them moved to leave anytime soon, and the waitress kept refilling their coffee, and outside the night stayed wide and open and for a little while Colfax felt very, very far away.