Another part of the coldness at work was that I’d never gone along with the flirty male coworkers the way a lot of the women in the store did, and the time had come to pay the piper. Both men and women resented me for my indifference. I suspected that the women felt betrayed—I refused to play a game they had never felt free enough to refuse, and women generally don’t like being reminded that if one is willing to be unattractive, you can get away with anything. Men resented me for more obvious reasons. After I had rejected Patrick, the warehouse worker who’d asked me out a few years before, the message got around fast that I was an oddball, probably a lesbian or feminist man-hater, or was defective in some other way their brains couldn’t dare to fathom. And now, though he’d behaved decently to me in the years since I’d turned him down, Patrick seemed to take special pleasure in fake-smiling at me when he passed by me, and leaning forward suddenly, wanting to see me flinch. Some men don’t trust a woman who doesn’t play their game, and then, if that women wins at a bigger game—one that has nothing to do with them—their hatred is complete.

It was fine. I had little care for what any of them thought of me. I was done with being liked, or admired, or trying to be understood. In fact, the more hostility I felt from others, the cockier and more self-assured I felt. Big-feelin’, is what my mother would have called it. I couldn’t help it. Finally, I was manifesting my destiny.

(“Never expect people to understand,” Jim said to me once. This was after he painted the outside trim of the market and the overall sign an electric, nearly neon blue. It was a stunning color, and tropical, like nothing else in the town, and some of the locals protested it. At town meetings detractors called the market Margaritaville, which customers gleefully related back to Jim, who happened to be a teetotaler. He’d shrug it off and play it cool. I had always admired that about him. He never allowed anyone to see what he really felt. I never did find out why he used such a fantastical color. The simplest and most radical explanation—the one I prefer to believe—was that he liked it.)

Being aware of so many opinions during my final days at the warehouse got me thinking about another issue, however. How would I create my other world without revealing the depth of it to others? By necessity many people would be coming and going from the property, doing highly specialized work, and I realized it would be easier to keep them quiet if I kept them mostly separate and uninformed, and I could even have each of them sign nondisclosure agreements to be sure they would keep my secret.

I can’t claim credit for this idea. I got it from an article I read in a newspaper about a sadist who murdered women a hundred years ago. When constructing his clever little murder hotel, he never allowed any of the contractors to speak to one another. If one of them caught on to his scheme, he killed them.