One day everything changed. They were still living in the apartment she and David had shared before moving to the town house. Bay was barely a year old, and she was playing quietly with the clean laundry in the basket on the floor, draping washcloths on her head and towels over her legs. Suddenly Sydney saw herself, playing alone while her mother wrung her hands and paced the floor at the Waverley house in Bascom, before her mother left again without a word. A powerful feeling surged through her, and her skin prickled and she let out a deep breath that came out like frost. That was the moment she let go of trying to be her mother. Her mother had tried to be a decent person, but she had never been a good mother. She had left her daughters with no explanation, and she never came back. Sydney was going to be a good mother, and good mothers protected their children. It had taken her a year, but she finally realized that she didn’t have to stay because she had Bay. She could take Bay with her.

She’d been so good at running in the past that she’d been lulled into a false sense of security, because no one had ever come after her. She actually made it through beauty school before walking out of the salon in Boise where she’d gotten her first job and finding David in the parking lot. Before she noticed him standing there by his car, she remembered turning her face into the wind and smelling lavender and thinking she hadn’t smelled that since Bascom. The scent seemed to be coming from the salon itself, as if trying to get her to follow it back in.

But then she saw David and he dragged her to his car. She was surprised but didn’t struggle, because she didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of her new friends in the salon. David drove off and parked behind a fast-food restaurant, where he hit her with his fists so many times she lost consciousness, and she woke up while he was fucking her in the backseat. He rented a motel room afterward and let her clean up, telling her how it was all her fault as she spit a tooth into the bathroom sink. They later went to pick up Bay at daycare, where David had discovered Bay was enrolled and was how he found them. He was charming and the teachers believed him when he said Sydney had been in a car accident.

Back in Seattle, his anger would come on so suddenly. Bay would be in the next room and Sydney would be making her a peanut butter sandwich, or she’d be in the shower, and suddenly David would appear and hit her in the stomach or pin her against the counter and rip down her shorts, then he’d pound into her, telling her she would never leave him again.

For the past two years, ever since he’d dragged her back from Boise, Sydney would walk into a room and smell roses, or she would wake up and taste honeysuckle in the air. The scents always seemed to be coming from a window or a doorway, a way out.