I pulled my backpack from the closet shelf and loaded it with warm, practical clothes, leaving all the bright, spring clothes that had been so pleasurable once, but had hung, musty, for a long time. I emptied the refrigerator and fed the contents to the cats and the rats. I walked through my apartment, touching all the things, remembering how I’d acquired them, the thrill of furnishing my first apartment, paying my own way, and I felt sad to be leaving it all.

Especially . . .

I spread my cape over the top of the box, smoothed it out where it was stiff and crusty with Joshua’s blood. The cape on top of the box on top of the wooden table looked like a shrine. And, in a way, it was. It was a shrine to adulthood, to growing up and leaving the things of childhood behind. It was a symbol of seeking truth, and justice, and making good all wrongs.

I would come back to Seven Slopes someday, and when I did, it would be as a good person, a nice person, an adult, and I would join the Yacht Club and play bridge and do all the right and proper things adults do.

I opened the window in the second bedroom so the rats could climb up and out, then shut the bedroom door so the cats would not eat them as they tried to leave. I said my good-­byes to each of the cats and kittens, my friends, their yowling voices dear to me, their feline smell pleasant and comfortable. I would miss them.

In a final gesture of farewell, I walked one last time into the bedroom, I suppose to convince myself that I was leaving, that there was no hope in staying, and as I did, I saw what they would see when they came in.

Indignation rose through me, knowing they would soon violate my space, enter my domain, my kingdom, and they would see before them just what I was seeing now.

Well, they would not. I swept my cape from the lid of the box, wadded it up, and stuffed it into the last space of my pack.

Wait, Angelina, I told myself. You won’t be needing the cape. Leave it.

And then I thought of Boyd seeing my little shrine, for surely he would, and I smiled, and returned the cape to its dramatic place atop the box. Then I hefted the pack to my shoulders, and without a backward glance, I left.

At the top of the stairs, the frozen air fell upon my face like a mask. I looked from left to right down the deserted street. My breath plumed out before me as I tried to make a decision. Where to go. Which way. Right or left.

The cold began to gnaw at me, and I wished for a little more meat on my bones. South. I would go to the warmer south.

Westwater.

Lewis.