CHAPTER 8: WHERE ARE WE GOING?

There was nothing special about the diner, and Darcy supposed that in its innocuous nature the true specialness thrived. Like McDonald’s had been built on a foundation of sameness and familiarity, diners like this were the same, relying on the same basic concepts.

They sat at a booth in the back of the place and, after ordering milkshakes for starters, Bella was drawing on the paper placemat.

Outside the dark windows, vehicles rolled by on the interstate and the push back from to-and-fro just kept on grinding. Darcy always thought of the highways around the country – the interstates and the state roads and the bypasses – as arteries and veins around the biological, living and breathing THING that was the country and, beyond it, the world.

No matter what ultimately happened to them – to her and Bella and wherever this ended up – those arteries and veins would keep on pumping in an endless wave of motion and destinations.

To think too deeply about it was overwhelming.