But no matter how smart she thought she was being, no matter how far she drove or how random her path, Joseph always showed up within days. Then he’d gloat. And he’d try to drag her back to Aurora, Colorado, with him. Often, he’d smack her around, taking out his frustrations over her determination to be free of him. One time, he forced her back to their sprawling estate outside Aurora, and she’d had to devise a new plan to slip away undetected.

The process was physically exhausting, emotionally draining and increasingly challenging. She had to find new ways to dodge him. New places to hide. And she felt herself becoming more and more isolated as she cut off contact with more and more of her friends.

The few friends that had a hint of her predicament had offered to take her in, but she refused to put them in danger, drawing them or their families into the line of fire. Joseph was too well connected, too cold and calculating.

Earlier in their marriage, when Carrie had confided in her best friend, Hanna, and taken refuge at Hanna’s house after an argument with Joseph turned violent, Joseph had taken his revenge by getting Hanna fired from her management job and kidnapping Hanna’s Yorkie from the doggie day care. Peanut had never been found.

Besides, Joseph knew most of the same people she did, so she didn’t see those friends and business associates as safe places. She was one of the few who knew Joseph’s dark side. He was good at presenting a charming, confident and gracious facade. After all, he’d fooled her before they were married, hadn’t he?

Now, she sat at the edge of the gas station/minute market parking lot and stared through her cracked windshield at the rural Oklahoma terrain. She felt conspicuous in her black BMW M4 coupe with the broken windshield, as if she had a neon arrow pointing to her. Flash. Out of place. Flash. On the run. Flash. Sore thumbsville. She shrank down in the driver’s seat, wishing she could simply disappear.

She watched a teenage couple climb out of a pickup truck, laughing and playfully poking at each other before exchanging a sloppy kiss and entering the store. Next came the man in the Sooners T-shirt, then a petite woman with two small children who were begging her in loud voices to buy them each a sugary frozen drink. Ordinary people with ordinary lives. She envied them. They had a place to go home at night. No one chasing them, wanting to hurt them. Or did they?

She knew that, to outsiders, she probably looked like the normal one. Appearances meant nothing. Just like wild animals, people learned to hide their vulnerabilities, their wounded hearts.