#regarding noah.

The gas station looked like it had been forgotten by the rest of the country. It sat alone beneath a washed-out sky, surrounded by miles of open land that stretched so far in every direction it felt as though the world had simply given up and unraveled into empty plains. A handful of pumps stood beneath a faded canopy whose paint had long since surrendered to sun and wind, and beyond it, there was little more than a convenience store with flickering fluorescent lights and a gravel lot where dust chased itself in restless circles. The highway that had carried them this far cut through the landscape like a scar, disappearing toward Montana in one direction and back toward Chicago in the other.

Devon leaned against the side of the Jeep as the tank filled, the steady click and hum of the pump the only real sound for miles. The air smelled faintly of gasoline, dry earth, and the lingering heat baked into the pavement. Somewhere overhead, a hawk circled lazily against the pale blue sky. Road trips always gave him too much time to think.

He glances toward Noah and finds himself caught, as he often was these days, in the strange realization of how much had changed. There had been a time when being trapped in a vehicle would have been another opportunity for an argument, another chance for old wounds to reopen. They had spent so much of their younger years circling each other with sharp edges, neither of them willing to admit how much they cared because caring meant vulnerability, and vulnerability had never come easily in the Vanek family. Yet, here they were.

Hundreds of miles from home, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, heading toward a state neither of them had ever lived in, sharing bad coffee, gas station food, and long stretches of highway that seemed to go on forever.

Devon remembered scraped knuckles and broken bikes. He remembered summer afternoons that felt endless and winters that seemed determined to bury Chicago beneath ice. He remembered Noah as a kid who followed him everywhere despite pretending not to, and later as someone who became harder and harder to reach. There had been years where conversations felt forced, where pride sat stubbornly between them like a third passenger neither one acknowledged. Years where it was easier to stay angry than to admit disappointment, easier to stay distant than risk being hurt again. 

The thing nobody ever tells you about brothers is that resentment and loyalty often grow from the very same roots. No matter how far apart they drifted, no matter how many times they disappointed one another, some part of Devon had always carried Noah with him. It wasn't obligation, and it wasn't habit. It was something deeper than that, woven into his life so completely that imagining a version of himself without his brother felt impossible. Maybe that was why this trip mattered more than he wanted to admit. Montana was the destination everyone talked about, but Devon suspected the journey had become the point somewhere along the way. Every shared meal, every late-night conversation, every mile marker slipping past the windows felt like proof that they had survived themselves. That somehow they managed to grow older without completely losing one another.