The night Everything broke-b

He nods, once, like that confirms something. "Do you have somewhere to go?"

The question sits in the rain between us. I think about my apartment — the one Daniel now knows the address of because he's been there, because he has a key I changed the lock on twice and he found ways in anyway. I think about Priya's place across the city, and how I can't drag her into this at eleven at night, and how Daniel knows where she lives too. I think about my mother three states away who doesn't know any of this is happening because I have spent four years making everything look fine.

I think about how I have nowhere to go that he doesn't already know about.

"I—" I start. Stop. "I'm figuring it out."

"You're not."

It should make me angry, someone I've never met saying that to me with such certainty. And some small part of me does bristle — the part that still insists I'm managing, I'm coping, I'm fine. But a larger, more exhausted part of me looks at this man standing in the rain with his calm face and his certain eyes and feels something strange and unwanted.

Relief.

"I have a place," he says. "Safe. Clean. No one knows it." He reaches into his jacket and holds something out. A business card. Plain white, black type. *Damien Cole. Private Security.* A phone number. That's all. "You can come or you can walk. Your choice."

I stare at the card. "I don't know you."

"No."

"That's — that's exactly why I shouldn't get in a car with you."

"Yes." He holds the card steady. The rain is beading on it. He doesn't pull it back.

I look at the street where Daniel disappeared. I look at my scraped hands and my ruined shoes and the sketchbook I am cradling like a child. I look at the black SUV with its engine still running, warm light leaking from inside.

I look at Damien Cole.

His face doesn't change. He isn't trying to convince me. He isn't smiling or softening his eyes or doing any of the things people do when they're trying to make you trust them. He is just standing there in the rain, card extended, waiting for me to decide.

And maybe that's why I reach out and take it.

He doesn't look satisfied. He doesn't look anything. He just walks back to the driver's side and opens the passenger door from outside, holds it, and waits.

I walk to the car. My knee hurts with every step and my cheek is starting to swell and the rain is relentless and I feel like a paper bag left on a wet pavement, soft all the way through, barely holding shape.

I get in.

The seat is warm. The car smells like leather and something clean, something without a name. Outside the window the street looks different from in here — further away, like a film on a screen, like it's happening to someone else now.

Damien gets in and closes his door.

He doesn't start the car immediately. He checks the mirrors — left, right, rear. His hands settle on the wheel. Then he pulls out and the safe house safe dark SUV moves through the rain and Birch Street disappears behind us.

He doesn't ask me how I'm feeling. He doesn't tell me everything is going to be okay. He doesn't try to fill the silence with anything at all.

Neither do I. The rain comes down on the windshield in long diagonal lines and the wipers sweep it away again and again, steady and rhythmic, and I hold my wet sketchbook in my lap and I watch the city slide past and I think about how just twenty minutes ago I was running and now I am sitting, and how strange and enormous the distance is between those two things.

I look at him once, sideways, carefully. His face in profile is all clean edges and attention. He's watching the road with the same focused calm he turned on Daniel — like there is a correct answer to everything in front of him and he is simply finding it.

"Where are we going?" I ask.

"Safe house. East side." He signals, changes lanes. "Nothing will reach you there."

Nothing will reach you there. 

I don't know why those four words make my eyes sting. I press my lips together and look back out the window.

"I'm Mara," I say, after a while.

"I know."

I turn to look at him. "How?"

He doesn't answer for a moment. Then, without taking his eyes off the road, he says, "He said your name. Fourteen times. On a public street. In the rain." A beat. "I counted."

I stare at him. He doesn't look back.

The rain keeps falling. The city keeps moving. The door is closed and the windows are fogged at the edges and the silence between us is not comfortable, not yet — it is two strangers sitting inside the same question, neither one ready to ask it out loud.

But I am warm.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I am not running.

The chapter ends there, quiet as a door clicking shut — and neither of us says another word.