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That was the plan. But what wasn’t part of it was…

Why I put his shirt in my bag.

Then I walked out through a door a murderer had left open for me, past an officer who didn’t look up.

And I went and finished my shift.

Ten hours of it. Ten hours of vitals and charts and a man with an infected thumb. I worked through the day with my sleeves pulled down over my wrists and his shirt still in my bag. Halloran didn’t notice a thing.

Nobody did.

But then that is what the veil is for.

A veil that had crumbled at the hands of a ghost.

20

BE A GOOD GIRL FOR ME

ANNA

Ihad a plan.

That was the thing people never understand about this. They picture a woman throwing things into a suitcase at two in the morning with her hands shaking, but it wasn’t like that. At least not after the first few times. Because I had learned that the hard way.

I had learned that you don’t build the escape when you need it. You build it on the day you arrive. You make your plan of escape while you are still unpacking your new life.

As for mine, it had been sitting in the trunk of my car since the day I first said the name Anna Vale out loud.

It had been sitting there in three other cars before this one, under three other names. And I had never once had to use it.

I thought about that the whole way home. Seventeen miles with my hands too tight on the wheel with my wrists screaming and my coat in a wet heap on the passenger seat. Which meant that somewhere in those seventeen miles I understood that tonight was the night the bag finally came out.

Tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight.

That was the whole of it. Get home. Clean myself up and eat before my blood sugar had already decided I was done for the night. Then I would get in my car and be four hours gone before anybody at Ashlock noticed a nurse hadn’t come back.

It was a solid plan. The only problem with it was my body and the exhaustion I felt. Something I realized when standing at the counter with the fridge door open. Because my sugar had been on the floor since the middle of the afternoon and I’d had nothing since a glucose chew in a locker room. Bread, cheese, half a carton of juice straight out of the carton. I don’t remember tasting any of it. I remember my hands going steady again about four minutes in, which is the only reason I know I ate at all.

Then I sorted out my wrists.

Sitting on the edge of the tub in a bathroom I had only just gotten used to. Saline, gauze, two loose turns and some tape, telling myself they would be good as new soon enough. I’d dressed a thousand wounds and never once been on the other side of my own hands.

And then I just sat there.

That was the beginning of it, and I didn’t recognize it at the time. I sat on the edge of that tub with my hands in my lap and I couldn’t have told you for how long.

Every time I closed my eyes, I was back in that shower stall. I’d like to say what came back was the fear. The alarm crushed in his fist, the door that didn’t open, the size of him blocking out the light. That would have been survivable. I had been afraid before, so I knew the weight of it. I knew how to lock it into a box and never open it again so I could function.

But that wasn’t what this was.

What came back was his mouth on my throat and his hand at my jaw. It was the sound I made when he told me to look at him. What came back was the burning ache between my legs and the shameful knowledge that I had craved those large hands to touch me.

Those slow, gentle hands that had drawn the dark, forbidden need out of me.

Because I could have lived with it if he’d taken it. If he’d forced it out of me. I could have stacked it up with everything else that’s been done to me and carried it, the way I carried the rest. There’s a whole language for that. There are words for a woman something is done to. A violent act committed against them.

But that wasn’t what this was and no matter how many times I tried to twist it into being a violation, it never quite made it there. He hadn’t forced it out of me, he had waited for it, and he watched it happen.