One
Annie
The first rule of disappearing was to look like someone who had never tried to disappear in her life.
That was what Rachel Donovan had told me after removing three pairs of sunglasses from my suitcase and replacing them with a baseball cap from a golf course I had never visited.
“Those make you look famous,” she had said.
“They’re sunglasses.”
“They’re sunglasses that say I have opinions about private aviation.”
“I do have opinions about private aviation.”
“Exactly.”
The cap, according to Rachel, said I had once attended a charity scramble with my uncle and had been bored the entire time. Apparently, that was the energy we wanted.
She had also approved two faded shirts, a pair of denim shorts, sneakers without a visible designer logo, and a canvas tote bag that had cost twelve dollars at an airport bookstore.
No jewelry. No dramatic hair changes. No large hotels. No posting. No calling anyone who might post. No making friends with strangers who owned active social media accounts.
“Mostly,” Rachel had said, standing in the doorway of my Nashville bedroom with both arms folded, “try not to behave like Savannah Brooks.”
Which was how I ended up alone at a beach café in the Florida Keys, wearing a pale blue button-down over a black bikini and trying to eat a breakfast sandwich without checking every raised phone in my peripheral vision.
So far, the phones were behaving.
A man two tables away was taking six nearly identical photographs of his pancakes. A teenage girl was filming a seagull attempting to steal a packet of sugar. An older woman had her phone pointed in my direction, but only because I was sitting between her and a palm tree her husband apparently refused to pose beside correctly.
“Move left, Gary.”
Gary moved right.
“Your other left.”
Gary looked toward the ocean as if considering his options.
Unless I had recently learned how to disguise myself as tropical landscaping, I was probably safe.
That should have felt like victory.
Instead, I had one hand wrapped around a paper cup of coffee and the other curled beneath the edge of the picnic table, because old habits did not retire just because a doctor used the word necessary and my mother used the phrase finally acting like a human being.
The café sat directly on the beach, all striped umbrellas, painted picnic tables, and handwritten signs making aggressive claims about key lime pie. The morning was still soft around the edges. Sunlight skimmed the water. A breeze lifted thecorners of napkins and carried the smell of coffee, sunscreen, and something frying in enough butter to qualify as a spiritual experience.
Behind me, someone was rinsing scuba tanks outside a low white building.
The sign above the door read:
REEF RASCAL DIVE CO.
A chalkboard leaned against the wall beneath it.
BEGINNER DIVES
PRIVATE LESSONS
