Distantly, I’m aware that everyone in the salon is staring at me again, and that a timer is going off. Someone’s color is ready to be rinsed.

“Beckett!”

Amira has her hands on my shoulders, and she’s talking right into my face, trying to tell me something about a door. But I can’t focus on her either. All I can think about is how the walls seem to be closing in on me, the faces zooming in until they look like reflections in a carnival mirror.

“I have to go,” I mumble. Then I turn and shove my way through the door and onto the sidewalk.

Outside, cold air hits me like a slap to the face, shocking me back to reality—just in time for the cameraman to aim his lens at me again. I’ve run right into the reporter. Which is when I realize that Amira was telling me to go out the back door.

“Beckett, is it true that you gave birth to the Clifford baby, known online as Lullaby Doe?” The reporter goes straight for the big questions this time.

I push past her and take off down the sidewalk as fast as I can run, and for several steps, she keeps up.

“Beckett! Did you kill your baby? Are you aware that the Crimson Cryer account tweeted in defense of you? Do you know who the Cryer is?”

But the reporter’s wearing heels and her cameraman is out of shape. They can’t follow me for long.

I lose them when I turn the corner, and I’ve gone two more blocks before I realize I’m crying. That tears are starting to freeze on my eyelashes, even as they scald my cheeks.

I swipe them away and keep running.

Three blocks later, downtown turns into narrow residential streets full of one-story houses built in the sixties. Some of them have been kept up, but most have missing shingles and paint peeling from wooden siding. Most of the low, shallowly pitched roofs are outlined by a single string of Christmas lights, already lit up, though it won’t be dark for another hour.

Drifts of dead oak leaves gather in the shadows of cracked concrete porches, most of which sit just a few inches above the ground. There are no basements. No attics. Life happens right here on the ground.

This neighborhood isn’t mine, but it might as well be. In Clifford, there’s one “good” neighborhood: Briarwood, where the local dentists and doctors live. Those houses are two stories tall, and they have attached, two-car garages. A few of them have in-ground pools.