Chapter 1: The Cold Asphalt
The rain didn't fall so much as it drove against the dark asphalt of Route 9 like handfuls of gravel. I stood on the wet shoulder, the silver emergency blanket crinkling loudly every time my small shoulders shook. My brown hair was plastered to my forehead and cheeks in tangled, dripping clumps, and my sneakers felt like heavy lead weights filled with freezing puddle water. Just a few feet away, the polished black exterior of my stepmother’s SUV idled with a low, predatory hum. The red tail lights bled long, smeary ribbons across the wet pavement.
Inside that warm, leather-scented cabin sat Evelyn. I could see her silhouette sharply defined against the dashboard lights, her face turned toward the passenger window as she looked out at me with absolute, chilling indifference. She didn’t roll down the glass all the way—just an inch, enough for her cold voice to slice through the hiss of passing tires.
“Get out,” she had said. Those two words weren't shouted. They were delivered with the flat, bureaucratic finality of someone signing an eviction notice for an unwanted piece of furniture.
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My fingers, stiff and blue with cold, locked tighter around the corners of the battered book clutched against my chest. Galrriets. The cardboard cover was warped from the humidity, the gold-embossed title fading into gray, but it was the only thing I had left that smelled like my dad's workshop—old paper, pipe tobacco, and cedar shavings. Dad had given it to me on my eighth birthday, whispering that inside its pages was a world where nobody could ever lock you out. Now, Dad was gone, buried under a polished stone six months ago, and Evelyn had made it abundantly clear that his daughter was just another loose end to tidy up before she moved into his downtown penthouse permanently.
With a sudden, sharp lurch, the SUV's tires bit into the gravel. The engine roared, a high-pitched whine of acceleration, and the vehicle lunged forward into the misty veil of the night. I watched the tail lights shrink into red blurs until they swallowed themselves entirely in the dark. I was alone on the highway shoulder, nine years old, wrapped in shiny foil, with thirty miles of empty mountain road stretching out in both directions.
