Rose knew keeping Mel out of their plan was going to be the hard part. What she hadn’t foreseen was Mel’s aversion to being without her electronics. To Rose, being off the grid is a holiday. For Mel, it seems closer to an amputation. Rose says nothing, waiting for Mel to work through the concept in her own time.

“Can’t you just go get a burn phone?” Mel asks after a while.

“No. They don’t have the bells and whistles,” Rose says. Mel knows this.

The exchange of words is peculiarly familiar; Rose realizes it is like the few times she has tried to talk someone out of an addiction. Invariably an exercise in futility.

As they talk, Rose follows Mel back to the living room. When Mel sees the changes Rose has wrought, she ceases fretting over the coming separation from social media and looks around. “What’s with the rearranging?” she asks.

Rose tells her, shows her the Rose-sized dog door with its camouflage, and the nest in the closet; explains her escape routes should an assassin come knocking.

Mel takes it all in without comment. When they are seated on the couch-become-retaining-wall, she says, “You do know how unbelievably weird this is, don’t you? I mean, you really don’t think this is a rational approach?”

Rose sighs deeply. “I do. And no, I don’t,” she admits.

“Why not just grab some cash and check in to a Motel 6?” Mel asks.

“I can’t face it,” Rose says. “I’d rather hunker down in a closet, with a doggie-door escape hatch, than spend a night in a soulless cheap motel. Let’s hope the bad people waste their time checking out all Charlotte’s fleabag motels.”

“Yeah,” Mel says, unconvinced. “Let’s hope.”

“Time for me to change and get ready to go,” Rose says.

“I’m going with you. Just to the MCU,” Mel insists.

“Promise you’ll go home after you drop me off?

“Cross my heart.” Mel crosses her heart. “And, for the record, I think this is deeply, deeply disturbing behavior.”

“If you can think of another way, I’m all ears,” Rose says.

“Just because I can’t think of one doesn’t mean there isn’t one,” Mel says.

Rose goes upstairs with half the bags Mel brought. Izzy had a nice collection of wigs. When she’d lost her hair from the chemo, she’d made a game of them—not for her own sake, Rose knows, but to make the hair loss less traumatic for her then eleven-year-old daughter. Mel has brought a pixie cut in brunette and a jaw-length bob in the champagne-blond color that older women often choose to hide gray. From Izzy’s dresser, Mel purloined a set of scrubs, the ubiquitous uniform of health care workers from janitors to brain surgeons.