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“Be a good girl and come back to me.”
Then he hung up.
21
THE MAN NOBODY LOOKS AT
ANNA
Istood there for a while with a dead phone in my hand.
Then I went and got dressed, as if I had just engaged autopilot.
Scrubs, a fresh set, because the other ones he had torn down the center, just like the set before it. Black sneakers, a size too big. Because how many people were going to be looking at my feet? I checked my CGM, did my insulin, and stood at the counter chewing a glucose tab from the strip in the drawer without tasting a single thing.
I was shaking.
Not badly, just the fine tremor you get in your hands when something enormous has happened and your body hasn’t been told yet that it’s over. But there was something else my mind had latched onto.
Because he had made a mistake.
And in fairness, he hadn’t been careless. No, he had simply told me exactly what he wanted me to know, and in the order he wanted me to know it. Because a frightened woman who understands her situation doesn’t try anything. Every word of it was deliberate. Admittedly, some of it was even kind.
And it just happened to be everything I needed.
Because a person who knew the dangers could account for them, and he… well, he had just told me they were in a van.
Not on foot. Not inside my building, not in the stairwell, not in the apartment across the hall. In a vehicle, at the end of a street, which meant they would follow me by road. Men who follow a car, in traffic and at a distance, are easy to evade. Which meant it gave me the advantage and that plan I’d had in the trunk of my car was still useful.
But not just that, he had also told me to eat.
Another mistake on his part that he didn’t know he had made.
You drive to work like a woman who has understood her situation, and that… that was exactly what I was going to do.
So, I put the last of the chews in my bag. I put my insulin kit in on top of them. And right at the bottom, I put the Game Boy with the cracked corner and his shirt.
My own souvenir.
Then I grabbed the only other bag I needed and stood in the doorway of the only place that had been mine, and for the shortest time yet. Then I really looked at it. Somebody else’s couch. Somebody else’s curtains. A mug in the rack. A bed I’d never made.
Leave it exactly as it is, I thought. Leave it looking like somewhere a woman is coming back to.
So, I left the glass of water on the counter and the light on in the bathroom, and I picked up my keys out of the cracked ceramic bowl by the door. Well, it was now or never and never wasn’t an option.
I went down two flights of stairs past a buzzer that hadn’t worked since the day I moved in, and out onto the street in the cold, and I did not look at the van. Instead, I got into my car and I started the engine. I checked my mirrors like a person who has nothing on her mind but the drive, and I pulled out. I then went up the street, past the mailboxes, past a white panel van with two men in the front of it who didn’t look at me either.
They pulled out about six seconds later.
I watched them settle in three cars back, exactly where I’d have put them, and something in my chest went very still and very calm. Because there was one thing I had learned very early on. Panic equals mistakes, and mistakes can get you killed.
Or captured.
So, I kept a steady speed and signaled early, only seven minutes into the drive, pulling into one of those big stores that sold about everything. Where you could walk out with milk and bread in one bag and socks, a screwdriver set and a blender in the other. The type that had groceries down one end and lumber down the other and everything a person could conceivably want in between. All of it sitting in the middle of a parking lot the size of a small airfield, with four sets of doors and a garden center bolted onto the side like an afterthought.
I’d been in it exactly twice. Once for a lamp, and once at ten at night for milk and a bag of chips, standing under those lights with my scrubs on counting down the minutes until I could put my feet up.
And that was the whole plan, right there. Because if there was one thing I could count on in any state, it was a dozen stores like this one.
