The Five-Hour Drive Home

Chapter 1:

By midnight, the fries had gone cold enough to bend without breaking.

I sat on the edge of the hotel bed with the cardboard box balanced on my knees, dipping them into a small plastic cup of ketchup that had formed a dark skin around the edges. The burger was dry. The wings tasted mostly of salt and old cooking oil.

On the bedside table, my phone kept lighting up.

Emma calling.

Then darkness.

A few seconds later, it glowed again.

Emma calling. The room smelled of industrial detergent and something faintly damp. A vending machine hummed beyond the wall. Every few minutes, tires whispered over the wet road outside.

I had driven five hours to meet Emma’s family properly. Now I was eating a bad dinner in a hotel beside a highway, wondering whether I should leave her two hundred miles from home.

There was something almost funny about it.

Almost.