“This is goodbye for now, Jackie. I have no more words for you.”

It was the strangest thing that Jackie had read in this text message so far. It was a sentence that was so incredibly rare for someone like Marah could say, someone always so ready to speak her mind, to fight back, to, well, speak anything, for that matter.

Jackie’s eyebrows raised at the sight of the three dots now pulsating on her screen, each second a knot in her stomach tightening, leading up to her throat until it felt that she had swallowed a balloon, constantly expanding and constricting her breath.

The three dots stopped.

They disappeared.

Jackie let out a breath, her red hair now sticking to the back of her neck. “I thought as much,” she muttered with a huff.

“Anything?”

The voice made her jump out of her seat— the passenger seat of a patchy, faded yellow beetle with an unreliable engine. She grew conscious of where she was now, an almost numbing pain of the reminder that texting Marah had always put her in her own bubble, in her own world, with just the two of them, the painstaking fact that this was most likely the last time she would leave that bubble.

And with a sadness, nonetheless.

“Nothing,” Jackie murmured to the driver, her sister, Casey, whose eyes were constantly drifting from the road—silent and undisturbed, barren, in the pitch black of the night— to her. “I can’t recover from this, Case. I really can’t. Even if we’re only gone for a few months.”

A sigh escaped the driver’s lips, reaching out her hand to pat Jackie on the knee. “You really didn’t tell her anything until now?”

“I couldn’t— you know that, Case!” Jackie’s insistence became more of frustration than anything else. “You know what she’s like— she would’ve confronted me at any chance she got, telling me there was another way. Telling me would could sort it together,” her voice grew quieter, more solemn, “stubborn. Painfully stubborn. But unrealistic. I can’t do that to her.”

“Privilege always makes people blind to others who scrape by to survive,” Casey shook her head, a hand running through her similarly red hair. “She’ll understand, Jackie. In time.”

“In time, when we’re finally well off enough that it becomes suspicious? That she asks questions again and again and guilt trips me into telling her the truth, only for me to leave again?”

“Like I said, kid, she’ll understand. When she realises that you’re a goddamned fighter, who hasn’t had the greatest life whatsoever, who has travelled from place to place to avoid the people who want to hurt us, then she’ll understand. Will you get her back? Maybe, maybe not. But will she get an inside as to what your life is like? One hundred percent.”

With a nod of her head upward, Casey glanced in Jackie’s direction. “And we don’t have much of a choice now, do we?”

Jackie followed Casey’s gaze— the Mexican border. There was no going back.