I was pretty angry with myself. I should have looked through the peephole. Maybe I would have discovered it was a stranger who’d gotten the wrong room number. Maybe I would have seen Manfred, who knew I was in this hotel. Or maybe I would have seen the face of my enemy.

Disappointed in my fearful self, I turned on the television set and watched a rerun of Law and Order while I had my soup and my salad. The sun never sets on Law and Order, and if I’d seen that episode too many times, there was always CSI in any of its incarnations. There is plenty of justice on television, but not so much in the real world. Maybe that’s why so many of us like television so much.

I ate slowly, and found that I was trying to chew quietly so I could listen for noise at the door. This was silly. I put on the chain and the night bolt, and with that measure of reassurance, I felt better. After I’d eaten, I looked out very carefully before I pushed the cart into the hall, and I retreated into the room and locked up again. There were no doors leading to other rooms, and on the second floor I felt no one could get in the window. But I drew the drapes.

And I stayed isolated in the room until the next morning.

It was no way to live.

Tolliver looked even better the next day, and the doctor said he could check out of the hospital. He gave me a list of instructions. The wound was not supposed to get wet. Tolliver was not supposed to lift anything with his right arm. He was supposed to have some physical therapy on the arm when he got home. (I supposed in our case that would mean when we returned to St. Louis.) Of course the discharge process took forever, but eventually we were both in the front seat of our car together, and I’d buckled Tolliver in.

I started to say, “I wish we could just leave,” but then I thought that might make Tolliver feel bad. We had to follow the doctor’s orders, so we had to stay a few more days. I was increasingly eager to leave Texas. I’d thought we might start house hunting this trip, and instead I wanted to pack our stuff into the car and drive like hell.

Tolliver looked out the car window as though he’d been in prison, as though he hadn’t seen restaurants and hotels and traffic in years of solitary confinement. He had on the jeans and button-up shirt I’d brought him, and he looked a lot more like himself than he had in the hospital smock.

He caught me looking sideways at him. “I know I look like hell,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You don’t need to tell me.”