The stitches in my side still pulled when I walked, eleven days after the surgery, but I made myself walk anyway. Dr. Kim said light movement was good for healing. I moved through the house like a ghost checking on its own funeral, one hand pressed flat against the bandage under my shirt.

I found Cassius in the sunroom. He was on his knees beside the chaise, tucking a cashmere throw around Katalina's legs. Her belly was round now, seven months maybe, stretching the silk of her robe. He brushed her hair back from her face and murmured something I couldn't hear, and she laughed softly, like a bell.

I used to love that sunroom. I picked the tile myself.

"Cassius," I said. "Can I lie down on the sofa? My back—"

He didn't even turn all the way around. "Don't make a scene in front of Katalina, Audrey. She's stressed enough."

I stood there a second longer than I needed to. Then I went back upstairs, one hand on the railing, one hand on my side, and sat on the edge of the bed we used to share. I pressed my palm against the raised line of the scar and thought about the kidney that used to be mine, working now inside someone else's body, keeping someone else's heart beating.

Three mornings later, I found Mochi on the kitchen floor.

He was curled the way he curled when he slept in the sun, except the sun wasn't out yet, and he didn't move when I said his name. I knelt down. His fur was still soft. I made a sound I didn't recognize as my own voice.

"Cassius!" Katalina's voice, from the doorway, high and wet with tears. "Cassius, come quick—she was so rough with him last week, I saw it, I didn't want to say anything, I was scared—"

He came down the stairs two at a time. He looked at the cat. He looked at me. He didn't ask me a single question.

"What did you do," he said. Not a question. A verdict.

"Cassius, I would never—"

"Get up." His hand closed around my arm, right above the bandage, and I bit down on a cry.

He pulled me through the house, down the hall, into the little cedar sauna off the pool room, the one we'd installed the year before Wesley was born. He shoved me inside and I heard the lock click from the outside.

The heat hit first, then the panic. I pounded on the glass until my palms went numb. "Cassius, please, I just had surgery, please—" Through the fogged door I could see a shape standing in the hallway, still and patient. Katalina. Watching. Her face was calm as still water.

I don't know how long I was in there. Long enough that my skin along both forearms rose into blisters, tight and shining. Long enough that my voice, when he finally opened the door, came out as barely a thread of sound.

I don't remember walking to the living room afterward. I remember the marble floor coming up fast and cold against my cheek.

Wesley's sneakers stopped a foot from my head. Eleven years old, and his voice already had that same flat, bored cruelty his father used on the phone with people he didn't respect.

"Just leave her, Dad," he said. "She's faking it again."

I opened my eyes enough to see Cassius look down at me. One second. Two. I counted them, because counting was the only thing my brain could still do. Then he stepped over me — actually lifted his foot and stepped over my body — and put his hand on his son's shoulder, and they walked away together, talking about dinner.

I lay on the marble and looked at the ceiling, at the crown molding I'd chosen from a catalog nine years ago, and I felt something inside my chest go quiet. Not broken. Just — finished. Like a machine switching off.

That night, once the house had gone dark and silent, I got up and went to the closet and pulled a shoebox from behind the winter coats. Amtrak stubs. A stack of letters in his handwriting, the good handwriting, from before. A Polaroid from a diner in Portland, the night he got down on one knee between the ketchup bottle and the sugar packets.

I read one letter all the way through. His words, twenty-four years old and stupid with love, promising me things he never once tried to keep.

Then I struck a match.

I burned all of it in the kitchen sink, the paper curling black at the edges, smoke rising thin and gray toward the vent above the stove. I watched until there was nothing left but ash and the smell of it clinging to my sleeves.

Then I opened the envelope I'd been carrying in my coat pocket for three days — the one with the federal seal, the acceptance letter, the words CLASSIFIED and RELOCATION and NEW IDENTITY typed in a font too plain for what it meant — and I took a pen from the drawer, and on the calendar by the phone, I circled a date.

Eleven days from now.

Eleven more days of being Audrey Reynolds. Then never again.

Dinner started normal enough. Roasted chicken, the good china, Wesley scrolling on his phone under the table like Cassius couldn't see. Then Katalina set down her fork and pressed a hand to her chest.

"I wasn't going to say anything," she said. Her voice shook just right. "But I can't keep pretending I'm not scared."

Cassius put his own fork down. "Scared of what?"

"Today. In the hallway." She looked at me, and her eyes filled up on command, like a faucet turning. "Audrey came right up to me. She said if anything happened to me, or to the baby, it would be my fault. She said it so calm, Cassius. That's what scared me. How calm she was."

I hadn't said a word to her all day. I hadn't been near her.

Wesley looked up from his phone for the first time all dinner. He didn't say anything. He just watched me the way you'd watch something on the news, some stranger's disaster.

Cassius's fist came down on the table hard enough to rattle the glasses. "Apologize to her."

"I never said that."

"She's pregnant, Audrey. She's carrying my child. And you're standing there threatening her?"

"I never said that," I said again. Quieter this time. Not because I was backing down. Because I already knew it didn't matter what I said.

Katalina dabbed under her eye with her napkin, careful not to smudge anything. Underneath the napkin, for just a second, I caught the corner of her mouth. It wasn't trembling. It was almost smiling.

I looked at my son. Eleven years old, and he was watching his mother get accused of threatening a baby, and there was nothing on his face. No doubt. No question. Just that same bored contempt, waiting to see what would happen next.

I set my fork down. I folded my napkin into a neat square and laid it beside my plate. Then I stood up and walked out of the dining room, and nobody called after me, and I didn't look back to see if they watched me go.

That was the last dinner I ever had in that house.

---

The message came through at 6:14 in the morning, while the house was still dark. I'd learned to check the device the second I woke, before my eyes even adjusted to the light. Three words and a number.

*Extraction window: 72 hours.*

I lay there a minute, feeling my own heartbeat instead of hearing it, and then I got up and started working.

Not packing clothes. Clothes could be replaced, and besides, none of what hung in that closet belonged to the woman I was about to become. I didn't take photographs either. Every photograph in that house had Cassius in it, or Wesley, or some version of a smile I didn't trust anymore, not even on my own face.

What I packed was years of handwriting. Notebooks I'd filled in secret, back when I still had a mind sharp enough to notice things and a habit I never let go of — dosages, symptoms, dates, the small cruelties nobody else would ever write down because nobody else needed proof the way I did. My research, too, half-finished papers from before I ever became somebody's wife, kept in a box I told myself for years I'd get back to.

I wrapped it all in plastic and sealed it in a waterproof case, the kind fishermen use, and I put the case at the bottom of my gym bag under a folded yoga mat nobody in that house had ever seen me use.

Seventy-two hours. I counted them the way I used to count Cassius's silences on the marble floor. One. Two.

---

My mother called on the second day.

"You've lost weight," she said, no hello first. That was Margaret Lane. Straight to the wound. "I saw you at the grocery store parking lot last week, from across the street. I almost didn't recognize you, Audrey."

"I've been busy."

"Busy doesn't blister your arms like that." A pause, the kind she used to let stretch out when I was a teenager and she knew I was lying about where I'd been. "I called Dr. Kim's office. I talked to your neighbor, the one with the dog. Audrey, something is wrong in that house."

"Mom, please." My voice came out flatter than I meant it to. "Please stop asking questions."

"Why would I stop—"

"I'll explain everything soon," I said. "I promise. Just — give me a little time. Please stop asking around."

She went quiet on the other end, and I could picture her exactly, sitting at her kitchen table with the phone pressed too hard against her ear, the way she always did when she was worried and trying not to show it.

"Okay," she said finally. "Okay, Bella. I'll wait."

I told her I loved her. I meant it more than I'd meant anything I'd said out loud in that house in years. I didn't know, hanging up the phone, that I was already running out of time to keep any promise I made her. I didn't know a lot of things yet. I only knew the clock in my chest, ticking down toward seventy-two hours, toward the last version of myself I would ever have to be.

The call came at 4 a.m. on the third day.

I knew before I answered. Some part of me had been waiting for a call like that for weeks, the way you wait for a storm you can already smell in the air.

"Your mother," Cassius said. No greeting. "There was an accident. A car, on Route 9. The police say it happened fast."

I sat up in the dark. My hand found the edge of the mattress and gripped it. "Is she—"

"She didn't make it, Audrey."

The words landed somewhere far away, like they belonged to someone else's mother. I heard myself say, "When," and I heard him say, "Last night, around ten," and none of it felt real, not the rain he mentioned, not the slick road, not any of it.

"I need to go to her," I said. "I need to see her."

"Tomorrow. Not tonight." A pause, and then, flat as a closed door: "Katalina's blood pressure spiked when she heard. The doctor wants her resting. Just — keep it together, all right? Don't make this harder on everyone."

I didn't say anything. I let the phone go quiet against my ear until he hung up first.

Later, a neighbor of my mother's called to tell me how sorry she was, how she still couldn't believe it. "There was a woman by a few days before," she added, almost as an afterthought. "Said she was thinking of buying the Fentons' old place down the street. Real friendly. Asked your mom all sorts of questions — her walks, what time she liked to go out, that kind of thing." The neighbor laughed a little, embarrassed. "Funny what people ask when they're just being neighborly."

I didn't laugh. I wrote the date down in my notebook, the one nobody knew I kept, and I underlined it twice.

The funeral was small. Cassius came for an hour, said the right things to the right people, and left early because Katalina needed him at an appointment. Wesley didn't come at all. He had a game.

I went to the cemetery alone three days later, before the sun was all the way up. The hillside was wrapped in fog so thick I couldn't see the road behind me, only the shapes of headstones rising up out of the wet grass like something surfacing from underwater. My mother's name was still sharp-edged on the new granite, the letters not yet softened by weather.

I knelt. My knees sank into the cold ground. I set down a single white chrysanthemum against the base of the stone, the way she used to arrange flowers on the kitchen table when I was small — one flower, never a bunch, because she said a bunch was showing off and one flower was honest.

"I'm sorry I didn't listen to you," I told her. "I'm sorry I told you to stop asking questions."

I didn't cry. I hadn't cried in months, not since the sauna, not since the marble floor. Something in me had gone dry the way a well goes dry, and I'd stopped expecting water to come back up.

I don't know how long I knelt there. Long enough that my knees went numb through my jeans, long enough that the fog started thinning at the edges, gray turning to a paler gray.

Then I heard footsteps on the gravel path behind me. Slow. Unhurried. The kind of walk that belonged to someone who had all the time in the world.

I turned my head.

Katalina stood at the cemetery gate, one hand resting on the wrought iron, her belly round under a long wool coat. She wasn't out of breath. She wasn't cold, either, or if she was, she didn't show it. Her face, when I found it through the fog, wore an expression I hadn't seen on her before — not the practiced tremble she used for Cassius, not the wide wet eyes she used for Wesley. Something quieter. Something almost tender.

She looked like a woman visiting a garden she'd planted herself.

"Audrey," she said, and her voice carried easy across the wet grass, no breathiness in it at all. "I thought I might find you here."

I stayed kneeling. My hand was still resting on the cold stone, on my mother's name.

"How did you know where to find me?"

Katalina tilted her head, the fog curling pale around her shoulders, and smiled the way you'd smile at someone who had finally, finally caught up to a truth you'd been holding all along.