“I know this sweatshirt—this is Shepherd’s, isn’t it?” Tillie smiles as she picks up the hoodie from the floor. It’s covered in bits of leaves and grass, stepped on for two days straight.

“Um...guess so.”

She seems more relaxed, now that we’re past the state line. When we pulled out of her neighborhood, I asked if she was leaving anything important behind. “Not important enough,” she’d answered, wringing her hands. They were shaking again.

Now, her hands are perfectly steady as she folds the sweatshirt and sets it on the backseat. “Guess Shepherd used my car while I was gone,” she says. “Not that I mind.”

“Actually,” I start, then clear my throat. “The sweatshirt’s in here because...he came with me. To find you.”

“Really,” she exclaims, still smiling. “Well, where is he now?”

I hate the sadness that hits me, all at once, just as strong as when I cried my eyes out in front of that empty lot. “I’m not sure. He took a hundred bucks from my purse yesterday at the hotel, left a note, and then bailed.” Fighting the tears again takes every bit of my willpower, but I manage. “Good riddance.”

“He stole from you? That doesn’t sound like him.” She glances back at the sweatshirt, as though it’s somehow proof of Shepherd’s worth. “I hope he hasn’t relapsed. He’s done so well, the last year.”

“Wh— Relapsed? You mean the pills?” Vaguely, I remember him mentioning something about that, but he’d made it clear he didn’t want to get into specifics.

“Pills,” she nods, “or, you know, whatever. Any of the other stuff.”

My throat is suddenly parched. “What, uh…what other stuff?”

“Oh,” she says quietly. “I really shouldn’t say anything else. It isn’t my place. If he’d already told you, that’d be one thing, but....”

“Please.” I draw in so much air, my chest hurts. “I want to know. I mean...it might help me understand why he left.”

In my periphery, I see her watching me. “Not that you have to tell me, but was there something, you know…going on, between you two?”

“No.”

I think I hear her laugh under her breath. “You answered that awfully fast.”

“It doesn’t matter what happened. He told me he was looking to get out of town, which was part of why I invited him to come with me. He could be anywhere, by now.” I speed around a truck hauling lumber, twigs and chunks of bark flying in its wake. “I’m never going to see him again. So you might as well tell me about him.”

Tillie thinks a minute, then sighs, “All right. But if he gets mad at me for telling you, I’m throwing you under the bus.”

Outwardly, I smile. Inwardly, I sneer: he can’t get mad if he never finds out, and he can’t find out if he’s gone forever. “When I disappear, it’ll be for good,” he said, the day we started this trip. Job well done, I think. It almost makes me cry all over again.

She cracks her window and puts a cigarette to her lips, then takes it out. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Not if you don’t mind me bumming one.”

She smiles. “Filthy habit. I quit years ago, but this mess with Nick really got to me, I guess.”

I nod as she passes me one, already lit, her lip balm on the filter. “I started again when Dad got sick.”

We smoke in silence for a moment. I decide to prompt her. “So—about Shepherd.”

“Right.” Tillie exhales through the crack in the window and eyes another truck beside us, this one carrying an entire shed, fully built. “Did he tell you his dad kicked him out, a few years ago?”

“He did.”

“But he didn’t tell you it was because of drugs.”

I shake my head.

“It was the pills and cocaine at first, I think. I’m not sure if his dad actually knew yet, but the catalyst was when he caught Shepherd stealing from his mother’s purse.”

I chew my cheek. “So it’s a pattern.”

“I don’t know about that. He seemed very remorseful over it, even before he got clean.”

He seemed remorseful over pawning the locket you engraved for me as a baby, too, I think about adding, but decide against it. It would just upset her—and it probably wouldn’t make me feel better, even if I do deserve a little revenge.

“At some point, I guess, he and his girlfriend got mixed up in heroin,” she goes on, oblivious to the fact I almost clip a guardrail as she says this, “and he eventually got fired. By then I’d caught on, so I gave him an ultimatum: he could live on the streets, or he could go to rehab. He picked rehab.”

“I didn’t know he was even an addict.”

“He’s very private. I think he’s still ashamed over it, to be honest. Not that I think he should be. Everyone makes mistakes.”

“Heroin is a pretty serious mistake,” I blurt, laughing out of sheer nerves, simply because I don’t know what else to do. I can’t picture the Shepherd I know doing drugs, let alone something as serious as heroin.

“He’s over a year clean,” Tillie says. “At least, I hope he’s still clean. If he is, that’s quite an accomplishment, so I hate him acting like he needs to pay some kind of...I don’t know, penance for it, his entire life.”

Her use of the word “penance” reminds me of our conversation about his father, how everything Shepherd did disappointed him, because it wasn’t tied to the church.

It also reminds me of what he said the next morning, by the bus station: “I don’t want to drag you down.”

“So he got his girlfriend into heroin, too?” I ask. The only thing harder to imagine than Shepherd doing heroin, is Shepherd getting someone else to do it.

“I’m not sure.” Tillie flicks her cigarette into the watered-down cola between us, holding the lid open for mine. I listen to them hiss. “I never cared for her, though: she wasn’t good for him. I wouldn’t be shocked to hear she got him into it.”

“What happened to them?”

“The day he got fired—from what I understand, at least; I didn’t know about this until later—he overdosed at a party, and all his friends just left him out on the street. Thank God, somebody found him and called an ambulance.”

“They left him?” I can’t help the pain in my chest, my heart going out to him. “Where was his girlfriend in all this?”

“She left, too. Didn’t want to get arrested.” Tillie shakes her head, scoffing. “He was in the hospital two days, and not one person visited him. If I’d known, of course, I would have gone to see him.”

“His parents didn’t visit?”

“His mother sent a bouquet. But, no, they didn’t go see him.” She waves at a kid in the minivan that pulls up beside us. He laughs, ducking out of sight. “His girlfriend showed up at the house when he got home.”

“Did she apologize?”

“No. In her mind, she hadn’t done anything wrong. She even brought heroin with her.”

“Whoa.”

“Exactly. I’d already had my little heart-to-heart with him, so he told her he was going to rehab the next day. She got angry, trashed a bunch of furniture, hit him, then finally left when I told her I was going to call the police. As far as I know, he hasn’t seen her since.”

As far as I know. As far as I know, he’s already called this girl to meet up with him somewhere warm and beautiful, his pockets lined with stolen money, hers with drugs. I feel every bit as stupid as he said this trip was in the first place: I don’t know him at all. If he was the person I thought he was, he’d be in this car with us.

Actually, I think with a jolt, he wouldn’t. At the end of our trip, we were going to part ways. That was the deal all along.

If it hadn’t happened yesterday morning, it would have happened at the diner last night, or along this same highway today, at some rest stop in the fading gray light. I probably would have forced him to take even more than that $100, just to make sure he’d be okay. His leaving was inevitable.

For some reason, realizing this hurts even worse than waking up to that empty bed.