The last twenty-four hours had been too eventful. I wanted to lie down in Moldy Mildred’s dark rooms and absorb the quiet.

But if I closed my eyes, I would see severed fingers. If I managed to keep those out of my mind, I would worry about Desiree’s boyfriend’s concussed brother showing up on my doorstep.

I could see myself pacing the house like an animal in a cage, which made me wonder exactly what animals were caged down the road. Were there really cougars a mile away in someone’s backyard?

Before I could talk myself out of it, before I could open a bag of chips and flop onto the couch, I was fastening my sneakers. Going for a jog would clear my head.

Our backyard had a row of mangy pine trees lining the property. Planted twenty feet apart, they stood like exhausted soldiers, fat and tired, unkempt and whiskery.

Trevor had mowed two days ago and had let the clippings scatter. The thick scent of hot grass puffed up as I walked the length of our backyard.

As I cut through the trees to get to the path, wispy threads of a spider’s web caught my hair and arms, and I yelled out. I wiped a tangle of webbing from my hands onto my leggings and couldn’t shake the feeling that bugs were crawling on my skin.

I broke into a run straight away, faster than my usual start. The forest to my right exhaled the cool dampness of a locker room. Backyards leading to houses on my left. The chalky path curved here and there and had mild hills.

I had never liked wilderness and wide-open skies. Too vast, too lonely, too many hiding places.

I was a city girl. I loved Chicago brick. The marble floor tiles of Union Station. The wide concrete walks winding along the lakefront. The steel lifting-bridges over the river.

You could count on these structures. They were sturdy and impervious. There were few hiding places in the heart of the city, places people could camp out, become feral, hatch mad hunting plans.

In the city, people were everywhere. They said crowds were dangerous, that when there were too many people around, no one took action, but I’d seen the opposite. I had seen people—a young black man, a middle-aged white woman, an old Asian man—step in between an escalating argument, ask a crying woman if she needed help, and chase down a thief.

And even when there’d been inaction, a dozen people with slack-jawed expressions, there was comfort in that because if something terrible happened to someone, to me, people would witness it, and when their brain fog cleared, the crime would eventually be reported.