like wet rubbe

two big men on the opposite bench didn't look at her. One was cleaning his thumbnail with a key. Th

t. Nobody was being dramatic

e loading bay, and through the little back window

we going?

y ans

. Whatever you were prom

ll looked up, finally, and

ean

. "It's not about the money. We've already been

sat in her ches

ed her out, turned to look back. Up close he had a bad shave a

s?" Serap

ed back

tic bag with her hospital discharge papers, and one of them had patted her coat, a lazy sweep, the way you check for a

slid it out onto her lap, thumb on the s

stopped answering ten minutes into the wheelchair

ssed hi

d the phone against her thigh t

rings.

ea

had spent eight years answering a phone at two i

g was cut off

nd silence, the soft electronic click of a button being pressed on the

buzzed i

something. Vivian's not

d it fo

s didn't

n an exam when you realize you've been answering the wrong question the whole time. She had been calling him f

all yo

going to wa

picked u

hen warehouses, then chain-link fences with torn plastic bags caught in them. The city thinned out li

man's ph

t the road noise swallowed some of it, and the van was small, and she had very good ea

ah." A pause. "Past the quarry. There's an old ser

'a

a closed

e laughed, a short, uneasy sound. "Right. Yes. Make it look like she walked out on her ow

brea

t times. A woman depressed after a fall, bandaged, humiliated, confused. A woman who simply walked out of a hospital one morni

hat no longer had her in it, a sketchbook would sit

ung up and put the phone on his kne

se?" asked the man w

k afterward." He rubbed his face. "Sh

grunted. "Th

a opened

st spots on the bolts. The long steel handle on the rear door, six feet from her k

front of it for twenty m

A body that had thrown itself down twenty-one steps and a concussion not yet twelve hours old. Two men who

a

potholes, running straight out under a flat sky. A few scrubby trees. A

on the dash re

ecause Dominic was somewhere sitting beside a hospital bed holding the hand of a woman who could not

a

burned out of her somewhere between a flight of stairs and a d

house. A pen on an eleven-i

na

she had meant it. She had not known how m

van because a woman in a pink dress had de

bored, and the one with the sausage roll leaned back and clo

ong the bench until it found th

ight mile

ad. Ha

ingers around the