Stunned, Sarah stared at the phone in her hand. Could it really be that simple? Could she start her vacation a few hours earlier than she had intended? She checked to see if she could upgrade her flight to an earlier one, but that was impossible. There were literally two flights in and out of the airport each day, and she had no other options except to just sit in another airport for hours. Maybe it would be better that way because she would feel like she had gone somewhere.
Kara knew her well enough to know she was packed. She always was, to be fair. She never knew when she was going to be home for long, so her suitcase always sat packed but open in a corner. With her lip pulled tight between her teeth, she wondered if she really could just up and leave.
“Are you serious?”
She knew Kara was fed up with her insecurities, but truthfully, Kara was the only one she felt she could share them with. At one time it had been her sister, but the past few years had only put distance between them in ways Sarah couldn’t explain.
“Yes, and if I get one more text that isn’t ‘okay I’m leaving,’ I’m coming over there and taking you myself.”
“All right. All right. I’m leaving. I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I’m leaving.”
Chuckling, Sarah stared at her ceiling for another full minute before she rolled off her couch and planted her feet on the plush carpet below. She wiggled her toes through the strands before standing and running a hand through her shoulder length hair, tugging lightly at the knots before pulling out the always-present tangles.
“Okay, I’m leaving.” With a breath, Sarah moved to her bedroom and shut the lid on her suitcase, zipping it. She dragged socks onto her feet, shoved them into her boots, and then stared at herself in the mirror. She was a sight. No one would recognize her with the wild look in her eyes, but being careful, she pulled on a loose beanie and hooded jacket, putting her sunglasses in her pocket.
She put in a request for a ride before she grabbed her guitar. Her heart raced. She had no idea what she was doing. It would be nearing five in the morning before she arrived at the airport, and her flight wasn’t for another six hours, but Kara was right. She needed this. She needed it more than she’d realized. With a heavy sigh, Sarah went outside to wait for the car to arrive.
As soon as she was through security and had her printed boarding passes stashed in the back of her pocket, Sarah sat heavily at her gate, needing to be with people for a few hours before isolating for two weeks. The hot cup of tea was balanced on the chair next to her. She’d kept her guitar with her, never trusting anyone with it although she wasn’t going to have much of a choice once they boarded the plane.
It took her an hour to get up the courage and boredom, but Sarah eventually leaned down to her guitar, pulled it out, and strummed while she checked to make sure all her strings were tuned up. She hummed lightly to one of her favorite lullabies her mom had sung when they were kids. She had no idea who wrote it, what the name of it was even, or if her mom had just made it up out of nowhere. She’d never asked, too scared to ruin the magic.
People watched her carefully, eyeing her up and down, before moving on. She sat with one leg crossed over the other, her guitar louder as her confidence grew and as she focused on the music, not her surroundings. Her songs changed from modern rock to pop to country to bluegrass, and everything in between. People stopped and stood by her for a while, took video of her, no doubt to post to their own social media pages. Her publicist would either eat it up or hate it. She didn’t care. She was on vacation.
Closing her eyes, Sarah listened to the music in her body, the vibrations from the guitar against her chest, the feel of the strings against the tips of her calloused fingers, the edge of her thumb that had had so many blisters over the years from forgetting her pick or just refusing to use one.
Her voice got louder while her disregard for the unexpected quiet but enthusiastic audience surrounded her. Closing her eyes briefly, she opened them again to see the clock on the wall. It was about time for her to stop, but she wanted to finish her song. Her voice carried around the wide-open room, the acoustics awful since the building was designed to dampen sound, not amplify it.
When her voice rang out on the last note, a round of applause went up. Blushing, Sarah dipped her head in thanks and settled her guitar into its case. She knew people would want to come and talk to her, and she welcomed it. While she enjoyed the silence at night sometimes, most often she enjoyed the chatter of other people. She was surrounded by others so often that being alone scared the shit out of her. After signing autographs, she begged off and headed toward her gate. It wouldn’t be long until her vacation really kicked off.
As she sat in her seat, Sarah closed her eyes, put on her headphones, set her phone to play random songs, and fell into the world of music she knew and loved so well. Oftentimes her escape was music more than anything else, but every time before a tour and after an album release, music felt more like a chore. She missed moments of bursting out in song when it didn’t mean anything, when music flowed through her heart to her fingers and through her lips into the world around her. She had to find that again.
* * *
The plane took longer than she had expected because of delays, and by the time her second flight landed, it was eleven at night and she was done with being awake and traveling. Sarah had been up for the better part of two days, and her eyes drooped. She’d thought she could get an energy drink or at the very least coffee at the airport, but she wasn’t even sure she could callthatan airport.
There was one terminal. Literally one. There were no restaurants inside the building, no vending machines functioning properly to give her sweet caffeinated elixir. She would know; she had tried all of them. Sarah gritted her teeth as she waited in line at the one single car rental place.
She stifled a yawn as they filled out the paperwork and gave her the keys to the car. She smiled down at them, hoping she could find someplace open in town that could at least give her enough caffeine to make it to the elusive bed-and-breakfast Kara had found for her. She’d been hesitant to try it. It was a fairly new one, but it was out in the middle of nowhere, over an hour’s drive from the airport. It offered seclusion, which was exactly what she had been wanting. She needed to think, and to think, she needed the quiet, not just the quiet of the few hours in the middle of the night, but quiet for days on end.
She threw her suitcase into the trunk of the car and settled her guitar in carefully next to it. “I’ve got this.”
Her phone buzzed, and she grinned when she saw Kara’s name light it up.“You’ve got this.”
Snorting, Sarah texted back quickly and slipped behind the wheel. She knew she was going to look out of place wherever she was going. In the city she might be able to fit in a bit, but out in the country? She would stand out like a sore thumb—another reason why she wanted the seclusion of a bed-and-breakfast that had nothing around it.
Indigo Ranch and B&Btold Sarah absolutely nothing. Its website had been nice but vague. There was a listing of things to do in the neighboring towns, most of it not interesting to Sarah in the least. There was a larger list of what she could do in the countryside, a lake nearby or a weird rock formation. She wasn’t sure. She’d only skimmed the literature.
She’d seen the availability of six rooms and the max occupancy for said six rooms. She’d checked religiously over the weeks after she booked it to make sure no one else stayed there while she did and had even debated renting the other rooms herself to guarantee she would be alone. Sarah stepped on the gas pedal and pulled away from the airport. It was an hour drive. She could do this.
She found the highway readily enough. After thirty minutes of driving on it, she turned onto a second, less kept highway. The asphalt clearly hadn’t been done up or patched in years. Her tiny little sedan hit each pothole like it was a crater in the moon telling her to go home. Her heart raced as nerves ignited in her belly. This was a bad idea. She couldn’t do two weeks on her own in a strange place. Kara had refused to come with her the multiple times she had begged, and she didn’t really have anyone else she could ask.
Sarah shook her head. She was stronger than this shit. Biting her lip, Sarah pushed the gas pedal a little harder and sped up until she hit the next pothole, and then she slowed down again. She muttered, “That was stupid.”
Taking it slower and more carefully, she cringed when the first bolt of lightning flashed across the sky. They had flown through that. That had been what had slowed them down, and it seemed as though the nasty storm she’d already weathered once had caught up with her again. Sarah gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.