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We tracked her as far as we could, and then the trail went cold and since then… nothing.

Fucking nothing!

Forty-one days of nothing.

And the only thing for me to take from those forty-one days was the bitter reality that ultimately, I had…

Underestimated her.

Not by a little but by a lot. I looked at that woman for eight days and I read her the way you read large print. Frightened, I said. Clever, but frightened, and the fear was in the driver’s seat, because that’s what fear did to people.

But her fear had never once been in the driver’s seat at all. No, it had been sitting quietly beside her the whole time, doing exactly what she told it to. It wasn’t often I got it wrong. You could even class it as rare. But this time I had fucked up completely.

But never again would I underestimate her.

After that, Yakov got to work, I told him not to look for a woman, because I knew she would change her name. I told him to look for the work instead.

She was a nurse, but I knew it wasn’t just a job to her. That it was the only thing she owned. It was the thing she was trained to do, and anyone with half a brain could see she took pride in it. Which meant that I knew she would never stop being one.

So, I told him to look for a woman with a clean license and no history in the county, arriving in the town nobody moves to. I told him to look for someone who would take a placement nobody else wanted, asking not one single question about it.

Every agency in the country. Every temporary contract, every temp post, every prison, every hospital, every clinic that takes short-term staff.

‘Thousands of them,’ Yakov said on the first day.

‘Then it is thousands,’ I replied in a hard tone, one he knew better than to argue against.

And for forty-one days there has been nothing at all. Forty-one days of lying on a bunk trying to hold on to the exact feel of her. But after a time, I had started to lose the precise weight of her against me, and there was not one damn thing on this earth I could do about it.

I had two things of her left and neither one of them was any use to me anymore. A torn scrub top that stopped smelling of her somewhere around the second week, no matter how carefully I have kept it. Because it turned out that a scent wasn’t a thing you could ration. It fades whether you bury your face into it or not. And as for her underwear, that I had rarely been able to put down… well, it already needed more of her heat. It needed her sweet pussy to soak it once again before I lost that too.

That is what the time did to me. It took the memory of my woman and reduced her to two pieces of fabric as I waited for a call that felt like it would never come.

Until it did.

“Govori.” I answered it in Russian, and it was barely a greeting demanding that he speak.

“Tell me good news.” I added after a pause, practically growling it as my voice came out like something dragged over jagged stone, and finally…fucking finally,

Yakov said,

“We found her.”

26

THERE’S MY LITTLE NURSE

ANNA

Here is the thing about disappearing that nobody gets right.

People imagine you keep your head down. They imagine a woman who doesn’t speak unless spoken to, who eats her lunch in her car and leaves the second her shift ends. But those are the people who get remembered, not the ones who join in. Nothing gets talked about in a staff room faster than somebody who will not join in.

So, I talk. I have always talked. I ask after weekends and I remember which one has a daughter sitting her nursing exams. I laugh at the jokes, even the terrible ones and none of that is an act, because the warmth is the only part of me that has never been a lie.

Then I drive home, and not one of those people could tell you a single true thing about me.

That is the whole trick of it, and it has worked in fifteen towns.