Chapter Text
It's 10:30pm, and the only sounds in the non-stop mini mart are the hum of the fridges, buzz of the lights, and the quiet, persistent scratching of a lottery ticket.
Sara is leaning on the counter, one hand supporting her head, as she completes her nightly ritual alone. She doesn’t remember how long after Damian’s murder she started doing it, only that once she started she couldn’t bring herself to stop. One ticket, every night at 10:30. Same ticket he used to get, same quarter every time. It’s still surreal to her what happened. She’s tried to remember how their last conversation went, only really managing to remember the basics. Hawaii. Jed being Jed. The look Damian got when Jed invited her to stargaze on the roof next door with him.
The car shop got abandoned, Abe was getting old and couldn’t run it without his nephew's help. Not to mention the grief and shame of what said nephew did. So it’s just sitting there, occasionally pissing off travelers who pulled off the road expecting to get help for their car.
Nobody got lottery money in the end, Jed said he burned the card. Sara thinks she remembers the lottery company on the news, mentioning some kind of trust or charity they were putting up in Damien’s memory, but there wasn’t a way to be sure. Maybe it was going to his family actually, and they were the ones putting it in a fund. Part of Sara hopes they just went to Hawaii in his honor or some shit.
She wasn't exactly sure what they were, what they could have been if it hadn’t happened. She isn’t his widow. She doesn’t think about him 24/7. But she works across from where he used to, and with every car that speeds past this stupid town she thinks that could have been us.
We could have gotten out. skipped town without thinking about the consequences. figured it out once this place was 100 miles behind us.
People in town hardly remember Damien after barely a year, he’s just ‘that nice young man who got murdered’ to them now. The case was only on the news because of Damien’s online following, and even those people have forgotten him as ‘that nice Subway influencer who got murdered’.
Now the reporter on the tv in the corner is saying something about a missing skier, a cold case getting solved.
And a drifter found at the base of a mountain, crashed in a car.
Sara is staring at the tv now, quarter in hand still hovering over the card. The reporter is talking, and Charlie Cale is a body in a car on a mountain somewhere.
There was a man in the mini mart right as Charlie left, asking where she was. Sara had lied to him about where she was going. It was the least she could do, she figured. Without her Jed would have been in Hawaii instead rotting in a prison cell. Sara had never heard of the Skier on the news, some blonde haired girl with a bright smile in every photo. The reporter wasn’t elaborating on why Charlie died, if she was murdered, if she was involved somehow in what happened to the skier. Just a body in a car.
Sara takes a breath, and returns to the card.
Charlie Cale didn’t die in New Mexico, Sara wasn’t going to either.
Somewhere on the highway, a trucker tightens her grip on the wheel, knuckles turning white. She changes the station.