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I pulled that curtain back and walked out into the store, and not one single person turned around. But I didn’t sprint for the exit or even hurry. I simply walked to the front of that store like a man at the end of a night shift with somewhere better to be. Then on the way, I stopped at the deli counter by the registers and picked up a sandwich and a can of soda and a bag of chips.

I paid cash at the far register, the one down by the garden center, and the girl behind it looked at my hands and not my face, which was what people do. She said, “have a good one,” and I replied with a curt nod of my head before I walked out of those doors into the cold. As for the man who had been watching me, I caught sight of him only once as he frantically looked up and down the aisles. All pretenses of him shopping now gone.

I even allowed myself a small smirk of victory as I walked across that lot the long way, down the far side where the cars thin out, past the propane cage and the stacked pallets. I kept my pace even and exactly that of a man who had finished work and was making his way home.

My car was still in that lot behind me where it would have to stay, but that was always the plan. As for where I was headed, I knew there was a gas station a fifteen-minute walk east and next to that was a bus stop. It wasn’t a proper bus depot with a building and a schedule on the wall. But it would take me far enough to the next town where I could then get myself on one that took me even further.

I even bought a coffee I didn’t want so I’d have a reason to be standing there. Then I stood there with my shopping bag at my feet, watching the road and feeling the sweat go cold under a pair of coveralls that could have fit two of me.

And that was when the phone rang… just like I knew it would.

Just like I knew what name I would see come up on my screen when I looked at it.

HALLORAN.

I looked at it for two rings and debated whether to answer it or not. But then before I could focus on the million reasons I shouldn’t, I put it to my ear, and I didn’t say anything at all.

“Tell me you are still in that store, little bird,” he stated calmly, as if wanting to give me the benefit of the doubt before his anger hit.

“What do you think?” I asked, and I swear I could hear him grit his teeth.

“Here’s what I know, my man tells me he can no longer see you. That you haven’t come out of that store so are hiding somewhere inside. So, I am giving you a chance to come out before he finds you or have you forgotten my warning of what happens when he touches you?”

“I haven’t forgotten,” I told him, and he sighed in what sounded like relief as if my reply meant I had accepted my fate.

“Good. Now tell me where you are hiding, little bird.” Oh, if only he knew. I didn’t reply, instead I watched as a pickup truck came off the highway and swung into the gas station. Then the driver climbed out and walked toward the diner.

“I’m not hiding,” I said and the silence that came back was the loudest thing I have ever heard on a telephone.

“Anna.”

“You told me I had two choices.” My voice came out steady and it wasn’t even an effort, which frightened me more than anything else that morning.

“So, I made a third,” I told him, and what followed was a growl of words,

“Where are you?”

“I can tell you where I’m not, but then… I think you have already guessed that by now, haven’t you?”

“Anna.” He forced it out in a voice so dark that, had I not been miles from him, I would have been afraid.

“I’m not going to be anybody’s good girl,” I said. “Not yours… Not his… Not anybody’s, not ever again.”

And then I said the thing I’d been carrying since a shower block the day before.

Since nine words about my last name left his lips.

“Goodbye, my ghost,” I told him softly, before hanging up the call and dropping my phone in the back of a pickup truck.

Then I got myself on a bus to nowhere. And as I watched a man with a coffee in hand get into his truck and drive away, I wondered where he was taking…

My last goodbye.

22

A PLACE I OWN

THE GHOST