Inside, she bought two colas, stood in the weak shadow of the overhang, and chugged the first one. She noticed a sparrow fluffing its feathers under a picnic table, beak open, panting. Even the lizards moved in short, frantic bursts between slivers of shade.

Lena leaned forward. A single crack, thin as a spider’s thread, had appeared just above the rearview mirror. It didn’t spread from an edge. It started in the middle, an ugly little star with a black center where the glass had actually fractured.

“No way,” she whispered.

The glass hadn’t failed because it was weak. It failed because heat and cold, when they meet too quickly, forget how to be friends. And in that forgetting, something has to break.

A sound like a stone hitting glass, but smaller. Higher. Almost musical.

She pulled into a dusty rest area just past the Arizona border. The temperature gauge on her dashboard read 109°F. She killed the engine, stepped out into the blast-furnace air, and walked toward the vending machines. The windshield, a slab of laminated glass now soaked in direct desert sun, sat there innocently. Not a crack, not a chip. Clean as a polished diamond.

The windshield had expanded under the sun’s assault—every molecule of glass straining against its neighbor. Then she’d shocked it. A sudden, savage temperature difference. The inside shrank while the outside swelled. The glass couldn’t decide whether to stretch or squeeze. So it split.