The mirror confirmed what security cameras would see: thrift store pants, Walmart turtleneck swallowing my neck, harsh dye job erasing the woman who once lunched at Per Se. My fingers trembled applying lipstick—Maybelline’s “Toast of New York” replaced by “Barely Blushing.” The color of forgettability.
Boarding calls echoed. I timed my emergence to blend behind a church group hauling Bibles and bassinets. Their rendition of “Blessed Assurance” drowned fear.
“Ma’am?” A bus driver’s flashlight raked my face. “Ticket stub.”
The paper stuck to my palm sweat. He squinted at fresh ink. No smudges, no hesitations. Clean escape requires clean documentation.
“Window or aisle?”
“Window.” Always window. Only one side available to grab.
The vinyl seat groaned beneath me, cracked leather breathing out decades of dead skin cells. I wedged my tote on my lap between me and the side of the bus. To the right, a grandmother shelled peanuts into plastic bags, salt crystals spraying my forearm.
Engines coughed to life. Across the aisle, a teenager’s AirPods leaked tinny trap music. I counted exits—two front, one rear, windows rated for emergency egress. Plan A: stay vigilant. Plan B: ballpoint pen to the jugular.
As we merged onto the Lincoln Tunnel helix, Manhattan’s skyline pierced the fog like accusatory fingers. My last glimpse of our penthouse, forty-two floors of electrochromic glass where, by morning, he’d likely smash the Baccarat decanters. Let him choke on shattered crystal.
Darkness swallowed us whole. The tunnel’s tiled throat vibrated with secrets. Someone’s phone played a TikTok dance tutorial. Peanut shells crunched. A trucker guy in front of me ordered a pepperoni Hot Pocket from the onboard microwave.
I unzipped my duffel’s secret compartment, fingertips brushing laminated certificates. CPA license issued to Julia Harris. Notarized transcripts from Columbia where I’d graduated before I’d been sold to Harrison Hastings. I took extension courses to stay on top of changing laws during chemo rounds—his sister’s chemo, my alibi days.
Mr. Liam Baucaum’s email burned behind my eyelids:Need someone discreet for ledger work. Cash basis.Discreet meant possibly criminal. Criminal meant untraceable. Perfect.
Trucker guy belched meat-scented fog. Grandma offered peanuts. I declined with a headshake, mouthingallergywhile calculating how far my remaining money would go in Texas. Protein bars were tossed into my tote, eighteen day’s rations if things went sideways.
Newark’s industrial wastelands streamed by. Factories pumping carcinogens into the rain-slick air. I practiced smiling in the greasy window reflection. Not too eager, not too sharp. Just hungry enough to take shit, competent enough to balance books for bikers.
The woman behind me argued with Medicaid. “…yes, the lesions are back…” Her resignation tasted like my mother’s words when she informed me of my engagement to Harrison.
At 11:47 p.m., when we’d made St. Louis, the driver announced this was our transfer. I followed Grandma to the terminal. There, I bought a Lotto ticket, then counted and recounted the change. Clearly, the look on my face told my story.
“Running from something?” She gestured to my wrinkled Benjamins.
“Toward,” I answered with a shrug, blowing my bangs.
The parking lot’s lights turned everyone jaundiced. Truckers compared CB radios. A meth-eyed teenager hawked bootleg Jordans from a garbage bag. We’d be getting on another bus after what was the equivalent of a layover. An hour later, we were back on the road.
The Greyhound’s diesel growl vibrated through my molars as we merged onto I-76. My thumbnail picked at the vinyl seat’s split seam, counting each exposed spring coil like rosary beads. The shiny white St. Louis Arch loomed in the distance.
I’d taken my seat by the window, my mind drifting as the scenery flew by. I tore a page from my sketchbook and took out a pen. Before I realized it, I’d sketched a black wolf standing along a ridge, full moon in the sky. Odd. He was looking right at me. Through me. I did that sometimes. Just started sketching. Let the pencil take me where it wanted to go. A handsome wolf wanted to say hello today.
We made different stops here and there, Tulsa, I think, maybe Oklahoma City. Sleep finally took me, and when I awoke, the bus engine hummed like a nervous heartbeat beneath my thighsas Amarillo’s city limits sign blurred past. I pressed my forehead against the cool glass. New York’s ghosts dissolved in the rearview—cracked crystal decanters, his monogrammed cufflinks glinting like fangs in low light, all shrinking beneath Texas dust. My new driver’s license burned in my sweater pocket.Julia Harris.
A toddler kicked my seatback in rhythm with my pulse. His mother mouthedsorrythrough the headrest crack, unaware my smile was rehearsed through years of charity galas. I’d groomed that smile for shareholders and ER nurses alike—once when he dislocated my shoulder, shoving me into an Italian marble staircase railing. “Clumsy,” he’d sighed to the patrons attending the art exhibition, thumb rubbing circles over my wrist bone. Always so tender in public. My parents promised me to him when I turned 23, shortly after I’d graduated from Columbia. His family, Wall Street royalty, of course. Things were fine for the first few months. Then his temper would flare. I tried to tell my mother. She told me he was in a high-pressure business. I needed to exercise patience. His family and my family owned each other. Soheownedme.
Outside, oil rigs nodded like iron stallions guarding the plains. The Greyhound smelled of diesel and microwaved burritos instead of his Acqua di Parma cologne. No pearls strangled my throat today—just sweat and the brush of my new bangs touching my lashes.
The Iron Valor’s crumpled job offer crinkled in my fist beneath my tote, emailed through three VPNs from a burner account after six months cleaning crypto ledgers for biker forums during his golf weekends. “Accountant needed,” their president had written below a signature quoting Sun Tzu.Not what I expected, I almost replied before remembering Harrison once hissed thatexpectations were shackles.
Rubber screeched as we pulled into Amarillo Station. My legs were stiff as I stood—new Hey Dudes instead of Louboutins gripping the aisle floor. I stepped into air thick with diesel and cricket’s song. An older man built like a house with graying blackhair leaned against a pickup sporting an Iron Valor cut. He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. And the roughest. Damn.
“Harris?” he drawled, eyeing my ball cap and mom jeans holding every cent I’d could scrabble together from money that Harrison thought was his alone.
“Depends,” I said, tasting freedom on parched lips. “You bring coffee?”
His laugh echoed across cracked pavement. “Oh yeah. You’ll fit.”
I didn’t think I could make it into the enormous truck. He literally almost had to lift me up. The engine roared to life after I’d managed. Then we went barreling toward whatever came next.
