Maybe it’s the wine, or the dimness of the room, or the puzzling clarity of his eyes, but before she can stop herself she tells him about hearing the baby cry in the middle of the night, how she rose from her bed and stood outside of the nursery for a minute, how she couldn’t make herself go in. Instead she walked past the door, put on a pair of shoes, took her purse down from the hook in the hall, got in the car, and drove away. With each mile, she pictured a length of thread being wound back around a spool, returning. Something being called in. She drove past the coffee shop and the preschool where they had talked about one day sending the baby. She passed the 24-hour Qwik Mart, and then there was a highway ramp spread before her like an offering. That night was daylight savings time, and she was still driving when the hour jumped ahead. It made what she was doing feel more unreal. She was no one, going nowhere. Just a woman in a box of steel and glass, like hundreds of others threaded along the highway, following the glow from her own headlights. Maybe she should have felt terror, or guilt, but she only felt free.

She took a bus from the mechanic to Atlantic City, passing billboards for eighties cover bands, a performance by Frank Sinatra Jr., Donnie and Marie Osmond. There was marsh on either side of the highway, the grass rippling in the breeze like a prairie. A few squat motels, the ones where she now spends her nights when she’s not with a john, or when they need a place to go. When the bus growled into the depot, she couldn’t remember the last time she had seen the ocean, so she followed its smell, the brine mixed in with the reek of overflowing garbage cans. She sat in the sand until the sun rose and the sweat began to slide along her spine. The exhilaration had yielded to something else. She felt scraped out, raw, exhausted. Used.

“Tell me more,” he says. They’re in his room. He had stood apart from her on the elevator, three people between them, so that she could only see him in the metal panels of the elevator car. She tried to study his face for what she had seen in the others’—greed, hunger, anger—but there was nothing like that. He knew what she was, but he seemed encouraging, kind. “What was that like?” he says, and a sense of confusion splices through her. Is this what he wants? Is he the kind of man who gets off on playing the hero? For some reason that makes her nervous, too. But she runs her hand over the bruises on her leg and pushes the thought away.