WHEN THE CAB CAME, JOSIE PUT HER SUITCASE INTO THE TRUNK, tied her bike to the roof, and told the driver to head toward Asheville. She didn’t know where she wanted to go; she just knew she wanted to go away, and finally after driving for hours, she told the driver to pull off the highway at Hickory because she liked that the town’s motto was “Come on in.” The driver dropped her at the Goodnight Motel, and she paid him with almost all the cash Mary had given her as back pay. It was a small motel, a family place owned by a couple with three teenage sons. Josie liked the small sunny room and the paperback library in the lobby, and she stayed for two weeks, accepting the family’s invitation to Thanksgiving dinner and letting the boys take her bike riding in the hills behind the motel. She rode under the canopy of bare tree branches and thought about everything in her life that had suddenly made sense. She thought about her mother, wondered if she had known what Josie had done or just sensed her guilt the way Devesh had sensed her need to be released from it, and she thought about herself, wondered how a little girl, barely strong enough to climb to the top of a sundial, had managed to suffocate a baby.

She slept and read, and watched Devesh’s long Indian phone number appear on the screen of her cell phone again and again. She answered once, wanting to tell him something she thought might come to her when she heard his voice, but she was only able to ask where she should mail his key. He told her to throw it away, told her he had taken an emergency leave of absence and was staying in Chennai another six weeks if she was curious. She wanted to say that she wasn’t curious, that she was doing fine, but she couldn’t get her mouth around the words, and instead she simply said, “All right,” and hung up the phone. After, she felt a stab of intense loss, and then the deep pulse of loneliness, and when it didn’t go away after three days, she decided that, for the first time, what she wanted was not to click her heels together and be whisked away to some alternate reality, but to feel something familiar, something comforting and secure. So she called Phillip and then bought a bus ticket to Atlanta.