For a moment, she wondered whether she could talk her way out of it. Tell Gary he didn’t have to worry about her, let her walk and she’d never breathe a word of the things he’d done, not even that he’d killed the only man she’d ever really loved.

Yeah, right. That was a plan.

She poked her head out the door and into the dingy hallway. To the left, the stairs. The smell of stale beer, human sweat, and cigarettes wafted up. To the right, at the end of the hallway, a window that opened onto the fire escape.

Miranda grabbed her bag and ran for the window, pushed up on it. It didn’t want to budge.

The voices were getting closer. Maybe halfway up. She could hear their footsteps. She pushed harder on the stuck window, and it rose an inch, just enough for her to slip her fingers under it. She put everything she had into lifting it, opened it wide enough to get one leg out and planted on the rusted metal grating. Then she swung her body through, her other leg.

She caught a glimpse of them entering the far end of the hallway as she pressed herself against the building’s cold brick wall. And then, as if willing herself to be weightless, she descended the metal stairs without a sound, and when she reached the bottom, ran off into the night.

She knew she’d have to get away and never come back. She couldn’t go to the police. They wouldn’t help, wouldn’t guarantee her safety. Gary always found a way.

She was on her own. She’d have to disappear. She’d have to make it so no one ever found her.

Because she knew he’d be looking. And she knew he’d never give up.

1

“YOU HAVE TO EMPTY all the change out of your pockets,” the uniformed woman told me. “And I need your wallet.”

For a second, I thought about making a joke. Maybe, under less stressful circumstances, I might have. A visit to a prison under normal conditions—does anyone visit a prison under normal conditions?—would have been stressful enough. But my reasons for being here were far from normal. And there wasn’t anything normal about the guy sitting in the pickup truck, out in the prison parking lot, waiting for me to do what I’d come here to do.

If I’d just been here doing a story for the Metropolitan, when the female guard asked for my wallet I might have said, What is this, a stickup? They don’t pay you enough? And then I would have laughed. Ha-ha.

But there was nothing to suggest that this woman, black, mid-forties, built like a safe, wearing a shiny black belt with a riot stick attached, was feeling all that jocular herself. Maybe working in a prison does that to you. You didn’t have to be an inmate to feel the oppressiveness of the place.

I’d already put my cell phone in the plastic tray she’d given me. “Okay, I can see how change would set off this thing,” I said, nodding at the security portal, like those ones they have at the airport, that I’d have to walk through to get any further into the prison. “But why do I have to give you my wallet?”