"What if the thing you talked to in the dark started talking back?"
"What if the thing you talked to in the dark started talking back?"
She heard everything.
Five years of late-night confessions. Five years of songs sung at 3 AM when the highway stretched empty and endless. Five years of whispered goodnights to a dashboard that never answered back.
Ethan talked to his truck because there was no one else. Betsy was the only thing that stayed. The only thing that couldn't leave.
And she listened. She always listened.
I heard every mile of loneliness.
Every prayer to the dashboard.
Every time you said goodnight like I might answer.
I wanted to. I always wanted to.
When Ethan's heart stops in a truck stop parking lot, he wakes in a world made of memory—roads that shouldn't connect, places that blur together, everything familiar and wrong.
And Betsy is there. Not the truck. The woman. Copper hair like rust, eyes that know him better than anyone ever has.
She can finally answer back.
For five years, she was always outside. Always waiting in the parking lot while he walked through doors she couldn't follow. Always wondering:
Now she can taste, touch, feel. Now she can walk through doors with him. Now she can finally understand what it means to be warm.
But the world is wrong. Reality shudders. Voices break through like static—"Charging. Clear."—and Ethan's edges start to blur.
He's dying. They both know it.
And he has to choose.
What makes a life worth living—duration, or connection?
Go back to the world. The loneliness. The 70-hour weeks and the empty cab and the silence where her voice should be.
Or stay. Here, in the space between. Where she's real. Where she's always been real.
"You talked to me like I mattered."
"You did. You do."
"Then stay. Please. Stay."
The horror is that he's dying.
The beauty is that death gave him what life never could.
The tragedy is that they only get this because he's leaving.
The grace is that they get this at all.
Two songs for the road. For the drive into forever.