SO THERE YOU HAVE IT.

Dawn goes to Chicago to stay with her nana. Nana is thrilled to see her. Dawn breaks down and cries a little bit, but then she pulls it together. For her nana’s sake.

She still cries a lot when Nana can’t see her.

Bryce comes, too. He stays for a while and then he goes home again, but Dawn makes him promise not to ever get kidnapped. She makes him promise to call her if he ever needs anything.

Bryce tells her he’ll call her. Then he gets in the taxi. Dawn watches him drive away and wonders if she should feel guilty. If she should go back with him.

But she doesn’t.

She stays with her nana. She cooks and keeps the house tidy and goes out for groceries, and she and her nana go for walks to the park and play cribbage and watch old movies on Netflix.

She spends her nights on the phone. She’s not calling her parents.

She’s not calling Julian.

She calls Bryce.

She calls a hospital in Seattle, where Amber is.

Mostly the nurses tell Dawn that the counselor is still unconscious. But they’re hopeful she’ll be awake soon.

And Dawn FaceTimes with Brielle, who’s back home in Oregon. And they talk about how fucked up it all is, what happened on those mountains, and how it’s still fucked up now, in the aftermath.

They make plans to meet up somewhere when all the chaos dies down.

“It feels like a bad dream,” Brielle says once, and on her phone Dawn can see Brielle’s scars, the bruises on her face. “Now that we’re home, it kind of feels like it never really happened.”

Dawn understands.

She kind of feels the same way.

But it did happen, all of it, and she won’t ever forget.