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And he had just made my reason for being here even more believable. Thanks to a phone call and that calm voice of his telling me that he knew exactly what I sounded like when my sugar was low.

He was right. He’d been right about all of it.

And it was going to cost him.

So, I came off the road into that enormous lot at ten miles an hour and I parked where anybody parks, halfway down, not near the doors and not out at the edges. Then I checked my mirror and watched as the van came in behind me only to stop about forty yards back.

There you are.

I sat for a moment before I got my large purse off the passenger seat, and I did the thing I had rehearsed far too many times in my head. I emptied the glovebox and grabbed the bag they had watched me carry to my car, the one with my coat stuffed into it. That was the only change I had to make to my plan. Because I needed a reason to get in my trunk without it looking suspicious.

My original plan had always included a woman doing her weekly grocery run, so grabbing a big shopping bag stuffed with other bags didn’t look out of place. But a woman on her way to work who was only stopping to grab enough to fuel her body for the next few hours didn’t need all those bags. So, I had to improvise.

A plan that started with taking one long breath before I let it out slowly. I then got out of the car and did it exactly the way I had rehearsed it. I tucked my purse over my shoulder and carried my shopping bag to the trunk. I popped it open, placing the bag inside and pulling my coat out of it, giving it a shake. I put it on before transferring the bag I really needed inside the shopping bag and pushed it flat.

It took me twelve seconds, start to finish. And every one of those seconds had a reason a bored man in a van could see from forty yards away. She got cold. Her coat was in the trunk. She put it on. End of story.

I closed the trunk with my hip, and on the way down I ran two fingers along the inside of the wheel well and came up with a fine black grit on the pads of two fingers. Then I kept that hand curled away from everything else so as not to waste the grime that was also part of my plan.

I then made myself look tired, which was harder to do now I’d had a good twelve hours’ sleep and was running on pure adrenaline. But despite this, I would like to think I did a half decent job of walking toward those doors like a woman who badly needed to sit down. I also tried not to flinch when I heard the van door open behind me.

I didn’t turn around, and I didn’t speed up, but I did feel everything in me go tight, because my suspicions of what might happen had just been confirmed and it meant only one thing…

My escape plan just got harder.

But I still had an advantage and that was the power gained when someone underestimates you. And if there was one thing I had become a master at, it was making myself invisible and escaping.

But here’s the thing, nobody sets out to become the sort of woman who can clock a tail in the reflection of a freezer door and keep her breathing even. Yet that is precisely what three years of running does to you and by then, I had a whole set of instincts I’d never asked for. Which meant that I saw him in the glass by the entrance. Heavyset, gray jacket, forty-something, and doing his job about as well as the ghost who employed him expected. Which is why he came through those doors twenty seconds after me and then stopped in the flowers and pretended to have an opinion about them.

As for me, I pretended not to notice as I got a basket and started down the aisles as if looking for something I hadn’t yet decided on. I even picked up a few things and put them back. I looked at bread for what felt like a geological age.

I bought nothing, but that was the point. A woman who buys her food is finished. A woman indecisive over cereal would be in there for much longer and I needed him to get complacent and more than anything else… bored.

I could feel him behind me the whole time. Never too close but one aisle over, drifting along in that unhurried way. And the strangest part was how quickly I stopped being frightened of him and started thinking of him as a problem with a shape.

He had to keep me in sight, I knew that as after all, that was his whole job. And to keep me in sight without being obvious, it meant that he had to hang back. Which meant that every time I turned a corner there were three or four seconds where he couldn’t see me at all.

Three or four seconds isn’t very long but it turns out, it’s all the time you need to disappear. Long enough to slip straight into a fitting room in the clothing section, which he wouldn’t think to check first.

After that, time was everything. Ninety seconds to be precise as that was all it took. I knew this because I had practiced in so many rented rooms, that my body knew it better than I did.

I didn’t get undressed but then, that was the whole beauty of it. It was the part I was most proud of, because getting undressed takes time and leaves a woman standing in a mirrored box in her underwear with everything she owns on the floor. Instead, the coveralls came out of the bag and went straight on over the top of me. Scrubs, tank, leggings, coat and all.

Men’s extra-large, which without the added layers would have been enormous on me. But I had taken the extra length off the legs and the sleeves a long time ago, back when I first put that bag together, and so all I became was a short, stocky, unremarkable man. One with my face hidden under a worn baseball cap and my hair twisted up underneath it. And to make it even more believable, I used my dirty fingers to smudge a little black grease onto one cheek, as if I had transferred it when wiping the sweat from my brow. I also worked the dirt from under that wheel arch into my jaw and along my upper lip. Not much of it. Because too much looks like a costume and very little looks like a man who has been up since four. You smudge it and you keep it thin and what comes back at you out of the mirror isn’t a woman with a beard.

It’s a shadow.

A jaw that hasn’t seen a razor since yesterday morning.

I put a smear of it on the backs of my hands as well, and along one thumbnail, because it’s the hands that can also give you away.

I took the spare bag out of the shopping bag that had held my disguise. The one I had folded flat at the bottom, with the name of the store I was in, printed on the side of it. The very one I had kept from a night I came in here for milk and chips.

Which meant that everything I needed went into it. My purse, the insulin, the chews, a Game Boy and underneath all of it, folded and still faintly damp, a shirt that wasn’t mine.

I looked at myself one more time in a mirror bolted to a wall in a fitting room in a store off a highway. And then I changed the way I was standing. I put my weight back into my heels, kept my shoulders rolled forward with my arms hanging wrong at my sides, and I watched the woman in that mirror disappear.

Hello, I thought. Whoever you are.