Washington didn’t appear all at once. Traffic thickened, trees gave way to concrete barriers, and navigation instructions started arriving faster than I could follow them. License plates from states I’d crossed over the past two days multiplied around me.
Then, somewhere between a merge I nearly missed and a black SUV that seemed personally offended by my existence, the Washington Monument appeared in the distance.
White stone against a washed-blue sky. For a second, everything else disappeared. The traffic. The ache between my shoulders. The empty coffee cup rolling around the passenger-side floor. There it was. Washington.
I laughed aloud in the car. The sound startled me.
The excerpt will expand as the manuscript moves toward its final edit.