Bonez Dubb sat in his parked car with the engine off. His tattooed hands gripped the wheel. Six months without Amber. Six months of songs that sounded like someone else wearing his voice. He had driven through two states already. He had called every number. Today he was going to try again, because saying sorry was the only thing left that felt real. He flipped down the sun visor and a folded paper dropped into his lap. He opened it slow. A bright dragon curled across the page in her colors, her patterns, her hand. In the corner, faded pencil: a date from three years back, and an address scrawled near a place she once called the worst stop in the state. He read it twice. His chest went tight. She had left this for him long before she vanished. She had known. Bonez started the engine. He drove until the road thinned and the fields opened up. A leaning red barn sat at the end of a gravel lot, paint peeling, a hand-painted sign warning tourists to keep out. On the door, taped under cracked plastic, was another small drawing in her colors — a wild little creature with a painted coat, eyes pointed straight at him. Bonez stepped out. The wind pulled the paper loose. He caught it before it flew. The address matched. She had marked this spot for him years ago. He was standing where she wanted him to stand. He walked closer. Behind the barn, a deep sinkhole gaped in the dirt, its edges crumbling, a rusted fence half-swallowed inside it. A second sign hung crooked: DANGER. KEEP BACK. His stomach dropped. She had sent him toward something that could break under his feet. He pressed the folded dragon to his chest and stepped past the warning. Whatever she wanted him to find was on the other side of that drop.

Bonez edged around the sinkhole, boots scraping loose dirt. The barn loomed behind him, but the pull was inside it now. He could feel it. Whatever Amber wanted him to see was waiting in that leaning red shell. He doubled back, ducked under the warning sign, and pushed the barn door open. Dust spun in the slant of light. He stepped inside. On a crate in the middle of the floor sat a drawing pinned under a rock. Half a dragon, half blank space, and a note in her hand: finish it with the book you left at my place. His chest cracked open. He knew the book. An old leather journal, his sketches, his scribbled lines, abandoned years ago. She had kept it. She needed it here. He had come with empty hands. The drawing would stay unfinished tonight. Bonez folded the page into his pocket and walked back to his car. He had somewhere else to drive now. Outside, he stopped short. A wide ring of mushrooms and wildflowers circled the lot, bright reds and blues he had walked right past. She had made this place hers while she waited. He stepped through the ring, climbed in the car, and turned the key. The journal was hours away, buried in a life he had stopped visiting. He drove anyway. The unfinished dragon rode in his pocket like a held breath. The road stretched flat and gray. He knew where the journal was. A tall white house with a wraparound porch, the place he kept but never lived in. His old keys still hung from the mirror. He gripped the wheel and pressed the gas. The barn shrank in the rearview. For the first time in six months, he was driving toward something instead of away. The dragon waited. So did the door he had not opened in years.