Every time, it meant the same thing. Someone decided I was too much trouble, too much risk, too needy—and then found a reasonable, responsible, grown-up way to explain why I had to go like the garbage on trash day.
I know when my time is up now. No one needs to tell me. It’s fine.
I wait until Declan's breathing evens out, then deepens. The specific rhythm of a man who's gone under fast and hard.
I slip out of bed.
The guest room closet still has my duffel in the back corner. The clothes Declan paid for hang in neat rows on the rod, and I stand looking at them for a moment—the blouses, the jackets, the shoes.
I leave them.
I pull on old jeans, a shirt, and my worn jacket. The duffel is still packed with my clothes, my toothbrush, and my utility knife. The only thing I’ve added since I arrived is food—granola bars, trail mix, the protein drinks I've been stashing.
I zip the bag and hoist the strap over my shoulder.
Hope is on the bed, watching me with her yellow eyes. She knows something's going on. She doesn't move, doesn't make a sound. Just watches.
"Don't," I tell her.
She blinks.
I look away first.
The window opens without a sound. Declan keeps the hinges oiled. He keeps everything in this house maintained and precise, and the irony of that—him making my escape route noiseless—lands somewhere I don't have the bandwidth to examine right now. I push the window up and step through onto the fire escape landing.
He has guards, I know that. Corcoran on the corner, the rotation Declan mentioned when he told me to stop walking at night. I know cameras are covering the doors, but they don't cover the fire escape on the east side of the building because there's no sight line from any of the posted positions.
Survival isn't something I had to learn. It's baked into me at a cellular level. I knew how to leave before I knew how to stay.
I descend, stepping gingerly with the metal ringing faintly under my weight. I step off the last rung onto the alley pavement, absorb the drop with bent knees, and straighten.
Then I walk.
East, then south. I have to get out of O'Rourke territory, which means crossing the city. I don't run. Running draws attention. I walk like someone who knows where she's going, head down, hands in my pockets.
The city does its city thing around me. Distant sirens. A group of rowdy revelers spilling out of a bar on the next block, loud and loose-limbed. A man and woman walking their dog. The sounds of a place that doesn't know or care that I'm moving through it.
I've walked like this hundreds of times before. Through dozens of neighborhoods at all hours—just another body in motion, too much of a nobody to be interesting.
I won't think about the bed I just left. I won't think about the man whose hand covered mine in the car and didn't move for the whole drive home. But I will never forget what he said in the dining room, and the particular quality of his voice when he said it—flat, final, certain. It's time.Saoirse’s gotta go…I just can’t stand it anymore. It’s time. I’ve gotta get her out of here.
Two hours out, my calves burn. I stop in the doorway of a shuttered dry cleaner and roll my shoulder to redistribute the duffel's weight.
The buzzing starts before I register what it is.
Again, more buzzing. It’s coming from the side pocket of the duffel. A muffled vibration against the nylon, rhythmic and insistent. I don't have a phone. I've never had a phone. The only phone I've ever held was?—
My hand finds it before I finish the thought.
The burner. The one Declan handed me that first night in the laundromat. I'd shoved it in the side pocket and never took it out. I forgot it was there. Or I didn't forget. Maybe I left it on purpose.
Six missed calls, all recent.
As I stare down at it, the screen glows in my palm, lighting up.
One text. Three words. I stare at it, baffled.
Please come home.
