She palmed the pills and fought to keep a grip on her fear, to keep the terror in its lane. She invented and discarded plans, burning through to a useless blank far too soon. She couldn’t think. Her ears strained at the quiet.

She watched the clock add minutes to her desperation. Owen didn’t come back in. Marcelline turned her head deep into the pillow so when the housekeeper checked, she saw her sprawled in the pose of narcotic oblivion.

Marcelline heard Owen walk past her room into his own.

But then the front door opened and closed.

When she heard the shower come on in the master bathroom, her fear whispered that she shouldn’t trust it, she didn’t know why the housekeeper had stepped out, or for how long. Marcelline was too weak, and where the hell would she go anyway? But then the plastic clatter of a dropped shampoo bottle bouncing off tile was like a starting gun. No plan necessary. Just go.

She peered from the open bedroom door, listening. All quiet except for Owen in the bathroom. She wobbled from her room out into the unfamiliar apartment. She was across from the laundry room.

Shedding the string-tied hospital gown that the nurses swapped out for a clean one each day, she ransacked the dryer for an enormous T-shirt. She yanked it down over her head and, in her rush, scraped over the bulky bandage at her jaw. It pulled free and the gauze dangled onto her shoulder. The air hit the wound and lit up the damp, tender wreckage, mapping the extent of the ruin that she hadn’t yet seen. Her stomach rolled. Suddenly, running seemed like a terrible idea. But she pushed the tapes flat, as best they would go, and swiped at the thread of fresh blood that tickled her neck. It didn’t hurt much. Terror was almost as good as morphine.

The shorts she tried wouldn’t stay on her hips. She kicked them away in frustration and snatched up the discarded gown and tied it around her waist as a ragged skirt.

Her medicines were lined up on Owen’s bookshelf, and she raked the orange bottles into a fold of the giant T-shirt she wore and held it closed against her body. Straining her ears to both the front door and the steady rain of the shower, she pulled open the desk drawers in the office, looking for her phone, for money, for anything that would help her.

Near the top of a loose fan of business cards scattered in the center drawer was a plain white card, a silver stripe in the middle separating a phone number below from the embossed initials above: S.K.

Marcelline had taken the card, an empty manila envelope for the pill bottles, and a nasty-looking letter opener for just in case she ran out of alone time or strength in her legs before she got out.