I pretended I hadn’t noticed him and got onto the drive. I didn’t bother to check for tails. If they wanted me to know, they’d reveal themselves. If they didn’t, my best strategy was not to try to flush them out now.

I pulled off at the first downtown exit, and stopped at the second hotel I came to. I turned my car over to the valet, explained I was going to a meeting and that I wasn’t a guest, and went inside.

There’s a network of underground passages that connect the hotels and high-rises on the east side of the Loop. I took the lobby escalator down, slipped behind a pillar, and knelt down. I didn’t see anyone behind me, but I still took off my Scarlett O’Hara hat and left it behind a potted palm. It just made me too damned easy to track.

I waited until a group of women all came down together, laughing and talking, and moved just in front of them so that we all seemed to be walking along the underground corridor together. They peeled off at one of the subterranean take-out joints.

I darted into a neighboring gift shop, where I bought a Cubs cap. Going up and down escalators, buying a frozen yogurt, I didn’t see the same face twice. I bought a red CHICAGO sweatshirt at another gift shop and pulled it on over my linen jacket. Although the weight of the sweatshirt on a hot day made me feel as though I were encased in a burka, I wasn’t instantly recognizable.

Still underground, I finally headed to my original destination: the Illinois Central station. There was a twenty-minute wait for the next train to South Chicago. I bought a ticket and stood near the door leading to the tracks. When they called my train, I waited until the last possible moment before sliding through the doors and down the stairs. I thought I was clean, but you never know.

The slow ride to South Chicago was like a backward journey through my life, the ride I’d taken with my mother so many times as a child, past the University of Chicago, where my mother had wanted me to study. “The best, Victoria. You need to have the best,” she would say when the train stopped there to let off students.

Ninety-first Street. End of the line. A certain desolation attached to the conductor’s announcement. Life ends here. I walked the four blocks from the station to my old home.

At least Señora Andarra’s grandson and his friends weren’t visible this morning, but a couple of helpless-looking men were sitting on a curb with a bottle in a brown paper bag. Somewhere, a car stereo was pouring out a bass so loudly that the air was vibrating from it.