She paid her bill. It was one in the morning. She left the bar through the crowd of smokers outside the door and strolled past dark storefronts toward her rental car. Rather than get in, she continued past it, down the sharp slope of Second Avenue toward the corner. She stood by a parking meter on the curb and stared diagonally across the street, where a crumpled piece of newspaper blew up against a brick building like a tumble-weed. The ground floor of the building housed a wireless phone store behind its big windows. Neon glowed brightly in the display.

Back then, when she was a child, the same space had been a bank office. The bank where her mother worked as a teller.

Tish had been in school when it happened. The policeman who came to get her had a black mole on his cheek and breath that smelled like burned coffee. He took her to the station and put her in a white room, and then a woman in a flowery dress came in and told her. That was it. She slept with strangers that night.

“I’m home, Mom,” Tish murmured to the air.

She turned around, leaving the old bank building behind, and stalked briskly to her car. The fresh air had burned off some of the alcohol clouding her brain. She drove north out of downtown through streets largely empty of traffic. The lights stayed green. She turned right at Twenty-first Avenue, crossed over the freeway, and curled around a sharp curve to the cliffside road that led to the condominium she was borrowing. She parked under the trees at the end of the street and got out. She lit a cigarette and stood there, smoking, letting it burn down. The lake twinkled below her. The birches were silhouettes with a thousand arms, moving and alive. Behind her, the freeway overpass rumbled on its stilts like a concrete giant. She felt strange. As if eyes were watching her. That was how Laura must have felt. Tish shivered, but she finished her smoke before crushing out the butt in the street and continuing to her front door.

She stopped. Froze.

One of the miniature square panels of stained glass in the door was shattered, letting out a square of white light. The broken pane was near the dead bolt.

Tish backed up, listening. Everything was quiet. She looked behind her, feeling a stab of panic. The sensation of being watched had fled. She was alone now, but she felt violated. With her cell phone, Tish called the police. They told her a car would be there soon. Knowing that help was close by gave her the courage to return to the door, which was unlocked, and nudge it open. She took a cautious step into the foyer, listening for anything that would betray a stranger. She breathed the air, trying to smell an echo of whoever had been here, but all she detected was a lingering paint smell from the work that had been done on the place before she arrived.