Beatrice sits in the passenger seat with her legs crossed at the ankle and her hands folded in her lap, the posture of someone who has spent years being photographed in cars but never actually driving anywhere. The dashboard lights catch the edge of her jaw, the curve of her cheekbone. She hasn’t spoken since we merged onto the highway.
I haven’t either. What do you say? Thanks for spontaneously deciding to flee your entire life with me, a man you met three hours ago, in a car that was actively haemorrhaging oil this morning.
The silence stretches. I watch the speedometer needle hover around fifty-five. The Mustang feels different with a passenger – heavier in the rear, the suspension settling into a rhythm I’m not used to. Or maybe that’s just the weight of the situation pressing down on the chassis.
‘You’re gripping that wheel like it’s trying to escape,’ she says.
Her voice is quieter than I remember from the party. Less performative. I loosen my fingers one by one, conscious of how white my knuckles have gone.
‘First time driving a fugitive,’ I say. ‘Still working out the protocol.’
A small sound escapes her – not quite a laugh, but close enough that I feel something unclench in my chest. She turns her head to look out the window, and I catch her reflection in the glass. Her expression has shifted since we left the Fairmont. The polished, camera-ready composure has cracked at the edges, revealing something raw underneath. Not fear, exactly. More like the look of someone surfacing after holding their breath for a very long time.
She reaches into the small clutch bag she brought – the only thing she carried out of that hotel, I realise, no luggage, no coat, just a silver bag the size of a paperback – and pulls out a phone. It’s the newest model, sleek and black, the kind of device that costs more than my monthly rent. She types quickly, her thumb moving with the practised efficiency of someone who has sent a thousand carefully worded messages.
I keep my eyes on the road. The highway stretches ahead, a dark ribbon unspooling into darker hills. The city lights are already shrinking in the rearview mirror, a glittering crust along the horizon that looks almost edible from this distance.
‘Who are you texting?’ I ask.
‘Someone I trust.’ She doesn’t look up. ‘Telling her not to say anything. Marcus will call her within the hour.’
The name lands in the car like a stone dropped into still water. Marcus. I picture him at the party, turning in slow circles, scanning the crowd for a flash of her dress. The thought gives me a petty, satisfying warmth that I immediately feel guilty about.
She finishes typing and holds the phone for a moment, staring at the screen. Then, with a motion that is almost violent in its decisiveness, she tosses it onto the back seat. It lands on the cracked vinyl with a soft thump and slides into the gap behind the centre console.
‘There,’ she says. ‘Now I’m officially unreachable.’
She says it like she’s just shed a coat. Her shoulders drop half an inch. Her hands unclasp and one of them drifts to the window, fingertips pressing lightly against the glass as if testing whether the world outside is real.
I want to say something meaningful. Something that acknowledges the enormity of what she’s just done. But my brain, unhelpfully, supplies only practical concerns.
‘So,’ I say, ‘where are we actually going?’
She turns to look at me. The dashboard lights make her eyes look darker than they are, two pools of shadow in a pale face. ‘East,’ she says. ‘As far as possible.’
‘Right. Good. Specific.’ I adjust my grip on the wheel. ‘Only, there’s something you should know about this car.’
‘It’s very old?’
‘It’s very old, and also very broken. The rear main seal is gone. The pan gasket might be damaged too. I had it looked at this morning and the mechanic said three to four days minimum before it’s roadworthy for anything longer than a grocery run.’
She absorbs this without any visible alarm. ‘But you drove it to the party.’
‘I drove it to the party because I’m an idiot who doesn’t make good decisions.’ I pause. ‘Also I couldn’t afford the repair yet. I was supposed to pick up extra shifts.’
‘Extra shifts,’ she repeats, as if the phrase belongs to a foreign language she’s heard but never spoken.
‘I quit my job in London two days ago. My savings are…’ I hesitate, trying to find a word that doesn’t sound pathetic. ‘Theoretical.’
She looks around the Mustang’s interior – the worn bench seat, the crack in the dashboard, the manual window cranks, the faint smell of oil and old vinyl that no amount of air freshener has ever managed to defeat. I watch her catalogue the evidence of my circumstances and feel a flush creeping up my neck. This is a woman who probably hasn’t sat in a car without heated seats since she was a teenager. The contrast between her world and mine has never felt more physical, more present, than it does in this confined space.
But she doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t reach for her phone or ask me to turn around. Instead, she gestures through the rear window at the shrinking glow of San Francisco.
‘That penthouse,’ she says. ‘The one we just left. It’s Marcus’s. Everything in it belongs to him. The furniture, the art, the view. I don’t even have a key. I have to be buzzed in like a delivery.’
I don’t say anything. The highway hums beneath us.
‘I can’t leave without his permission,’ she continues. ‘Not for a coffee, not for a walk. There’s always a schedule, a car, a security detail. He calls it protection. He calls it brand management. But it’s not.’ She pauses. ‘It’s a cage. A very beautiful, very expensive cage.’
The envy I’ve been carrying since the moment I recognised her – that sharp, covetous admiration of her fame, her wealth, her impossible life – curdles in my stomach. I think about my flat in London, the one with the single window that looks out onto a brick wall. I think about the Tesco meal-deal wrappers piling up on my desk, the subscriber count frozen at forty-seven, the eighty-three views on my last video. I’ve spent years imagining that her kind of success would solve everything. That if I could just get enough people to see me, to validate me, I’d finally feel like I was enough.
But she has all of it. The followers, the fame, the money. And she just threw her phone into the back seat of a broken-down Mustang like it was a grenade.
‘Wealth isn’t the same as freedom,’ I say. It comes out quieter than I intended.
‘No,’ she says. ‘It isn’t.’
We drive in silence for another mile. The road climbs slightly, and the Mustang’s engine labours on the incline, a reminder that every mile we cover is borrowed against a mechanical debt that will eventually come due. I should be panicking. I should be calculating the cost of a tow truck, the price of a motel, the dwindling balance in my current account. Instead, I feel strangely calm. The panic is there, but it’s distant, like thunder from a storm that hasn’t reached us yet.
‘We should find somewhere to stop,’ I say. ‘The car needs to cool down, and we need to figure out an actual plan that doesn’t involve driving until we run out of either road or oil.’
‘A motel?’
‘Unless you’d prefer a five-star resort. I should warn you, my budget is more “free continental breakfast” than “room service.”’
She smiles. It’s small, barely a movement at the corner of her mouth, but it reaches her eyes in a way that her party smile never did. ‘A motel sounds perfect,’ she says.
I take the next exit. The off-ramp curves down into darkness, the highway’s sodium glow giving way to the weaker light of a single Shell station and a cluster of low buildings huddled together like cattle against the cold. The motel sign buzzes in pink neon: VACANCY. Below it, a smaller sign promises free Wi-Fi and colour TV, both of which strike me as optimistic given the general state of the property.
I pull into the car park and cut the engine. The sudden silence is enormous. Without the motor’s growl, I can hear everything, the tick of cooling metal, the distant whine of a truck on the highway, my own heartbeat thudding in my ears. The Mustang’s headlights die, and the world contracts to the pink glow of the motel sign reflecting off the bonnet.
Beatrice doesn’t move. She’s looking at the motel with an expression I can’t read. Not disappointment, exactly. Something closer to wonder.
‘I’ve never stayed in a motel,’ she says.
‘Never?’
‘Always hotels. Always booked by someone else. Always the penthouse suite.’ She opens her door before I can respond, stepping out into the cool night air. The wind catches her dress, and she wraps her arms around herself, but she doesn’t shiver. She just stands there, looking at the flickering sign like it’s a landmark she’s been searching for her entire life.
I get out too. My legs are stiff from driving, and my shirt is damp with sweat I didn’t notice accumulating. The air smells of petrol and desert sage, a combination that shouldn’t work but somehow does. I walk around to her side of the car, and we stand together in the empty car park, two people who barely know each other, united by the shared insanity of what we’ve just done.
‘Arthur,’ she says. It’s the first time she’s said my name since we left. She says it carefully, like she’s testing the weight of it.
‘Yes?’
‘Thank you.’
She doesn’t elaborate. She doesn’t need to. I understand that she’s not thanking me for the ride, or for the motel, or for the escape. She’s thanking me for seeing her. Not the actress, not the brand, not the carefully managed product that Marcus has spent years constructing. Her.
The Mustang ticks beside us, its engine shedding heat into the night. The motel sign hums. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote yips, and another answers. I think about the phone lying on the back seat, dark and silent. I think about Marcus, wherever he is, beginning to realise that his most valuable asset has vanished. I think about my YouTube channel, my forty-seven subscribers, my eighty-three views, and how none of it seems to matter anymore.
‘We should get rooms,’ I say.
‘Two?’
‘I assumed…’
‘Two is good,’ she says, but there’s a flicker of something in her voice that makes me wonder if she’s disappointed or relieved. Maybe both. Maybe she doesn’t know yet either.
I grab my duffel bag from the boot, the same battered canvas bag I packed in my London flat what feels like a lifetime ago, and we walk toward the motel office. The night wraps around us, cool and clean and full of possibility. Behind us, the highway stretches east into darkness, a road we haven’t travelled yet but will, come morning.
The adventure has begun. I have no idea where it ends.
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