One day, maybe, everything with her wouldn’t have to be so damn hard.

He pushed her away, sunk deeper into the seat, and let his mind drift through the two hours that separated the runway from the mirrored multistory hotel in downtown Cleveland. He lost another forty minutes at Walmart in between, time that was expensive and hard to spend, but a single detour that netted burner phones, tools, and change-making supplies had no substitute.

The driver left him at the hotel curb.

He waited, suitcase by his side and newly acquired goods in hand, for the Yukon to swing out of sight and then turned for the hotel’s front doors.

He had two hours to lose everything that connected him to Russia and to lose himself. For that, he didn’t need a room, per se.

He needed a focal point those hunting him could focus in on, and a hotel worked as well as anything else. This hotel or another, it didn’t matter. This had just been the first one to come to mind. The check-in process ate another ten minutes.

In the room he emptied the suitcase out onto the bed, grabbed toilet paper, toiletries, and hotel towels from the bathroom, courtesy of the Russians, who didn’t yet know they’d be paying for them, and divided the pile between three shopping bags.

He added those items to the supplies he’d purchased, stuffed it all into a larger duffel bag, and walked out into a late afternoon chill with everything but the travel documents and the empty suitcase.

Not the wisest course of action.

He was bleeding time faster than money, but to leave anything in the room was to throw it away, and he couldn’t bring himself to do that, not even now.

He had Clare to thank for that, too, he supposed, a lifetime of uprooting and abandoning most of what he owned, and starting over somewhere new, again, and again, and again.

“Belongings are chains,” Clare would say. “They mark you as a stranger, slow you down when you carry them, make it hard to move.”

But they were kids, and like other kids, they hated not having.

Worse was having to give up what little they did have, and so in compromise, each departure came with the promise of something new on arrival, always temporary, always to be left behind when the time came again, and the time always came again.

In the days and hours counting down, Clare would ferry them into slums, orphanages, prisons that housed young children with their mothers and would have them hand off what they treasured to those who had even less.