Dylan had it all wrong. Ben was about as threatening as a mouse.

It was Joan I had to watch out for.

—

There was no guidebook for running away from an abusive husband. I had to go with my gut nine times out of ten, and my gut hated towns.

CNN was on in most bars all day. Magazines shouted scandalous, salacious headlines: Wife Missing! Man Grieving! in every grocery store.

Internet access was everywhere.

The potential of being spotted—found—just seemed so much higher in a city.

But that’s where grocery stores were.

In this case, Cherokee, North Carolina. There was an Indian reservation just outside of town and its influence was heavy in all the gift stores, with women and men in full headdress sitting out front, selling the chance to take a picture with them for five bucks.

All the restaurants had the word Chief in them.

It was a strange place.

The Appalachian Trail also went through here, or near here somewhere. There were men and women with giant backpacks, and filthy legs beneath their shorts, walking along the side of the road with their thumbs out.

Hitchhiking? Really?

Who the hell got to be so naive? So trusting? They were literally asking for trouble.

But when I caught sight of their faces in my rearview mirror, I realized they were probably my age. Just out of college, maybe. Having a little adventure before finding a job, or going back to grad school.

I stopped looking at them. Angry at all their opportunity. Their youth that looked so different from mine.

An IGA sat on a corner and I pulled in and parked in the shadows closest to the dumpster. In the silence of the car after turning off the engine, I went over my plan.

Get in, get out. Don’t make eye contact. Be forgettable.

That had been my credo for my week on the run.

Forgettable, I could do. I’d perfected it, really.

Once inside, I sped through the aisles, picking the same things I had for years until I stopped, my hands on a box of cereal that Hoyt loved.

I’m not…I don’t have to get this. I put the Cheerios back on the shelf and then turned to get the generic Froot Loops. My favorite. Glancing down in the cart, I realized I’d gotten all of his favorite things.

Cottage cheese.

I hated cottage cheese.

As I walked back to the dairy section to put the cottage cheese away, I felt someone watching me, and I looked out of the corner of my eyes at a woman with three kids hanging off the cart. All of them staring at me.

I accidentally made eye contact and the woman smiled.

“Do I know you?” she asked. “You look really familiar.”

Panic slipped over me like delicate, poisonous lace.

“I don’t think so,” I said, resisting the urge to put my sunglasses down over my eyes, leave the basket, and run.

“You’re working out at the Flowered Manor, aren’t you?” she said. “We live there.”

She looked like a teenager, covered in babies and toddlers. One of them, a little boy, was pulling down on the hem of her ratty Old Navy tee shirt until I could see the dark edges of a bruise on her shoulder.

The woman yanked her shirt out of the little boy’s hands. “Stop it, Danny,” she hissed. She smiled over at me, her eyes somewhere on the floor. “We gotta go,” she murmured, and then pushed her cart in the other direction.

Fast.

I stood there in front of the yogurt and shook for a moment. How many times have I done that? Without the kids and the diapers, but how many times have I dashed away, eyes on the floor? Shame a thick, awful taste in my mouth.

Should I find her? Talk to her?

Hell, no, my gut spoke up. Get what you need and get gone.

In and out.

It really was for the best.

My cart was far from full, but somehow impossibly satisfying, full of all the things I liked. I even splurged on a big bag of generic chocolate chips. I’d put them in the freezer and let myself have a few every night.

Mom would hardly approve, but that sort of seemed the point.

The woman with the kids had left the store. Her abandoned cart sat next to the manager’s hold desk, the big box of diapers wedged in next to a gallon of milk and a bag of apples.

She’d left it all. Everything she came here to get she just abandoned.

I asked the cashier for directions to the library across town and tried to pretend that cart full of things a family needed wasn’t even there.

Inside the library, it was quiet and empty and smelled like old books and air-conditioning.

Without looking too closely at the kind-seeming woman at the desk, I headed right over to the bank of computers on the far wall.

“Excuse me, miss,” the woman said, using that quiet librarian voice that somehow managed to travel across the room. I wondered if there was a class for that in college.

“Yes?”

“You need to sign in to use the computers.”

“Pardon?” I glanced around the empty library.

“We just need you to sign in, so we can prove that people use the computers here. That they are an asset to the community.”

“I’m not part of the community—I’m just passing through.”

“I still need you to sign in,” she said with a smile.

I’m being ridiculous, I thought, walking back over to the desk and the clipboard there, the red pen attached with a string and masking tape. Panic fluttered in my belly. I wasn’t a good liar and I’d been lying about my name all across the country the last week.

What if she asked for ID?

“You forget your name, sweetheart?” the woman asked, eyes twinkling.

I wish.

With a quick breath, like I was about to dive underwater, I picked up the pen and scrawled Layla McKay across the form and thought of Dylan.

He lurked in the back of my brain all the time. When I stopped thinking of something else, there he was. Filling my head with thoughts that made me uncomfortable.

“Thank you,” the librarian said.

“No problem.”

I sat back down at the computer and scanned the headlines for Oklahoma papers. No mention of me in Tulsa. Oklahoma City. Or in the Bassett Gazette, the town newspaper closest to the farm. I’d been checking that one religiously since I’d left.

I did a quick search of my name and all that showed up was my marriage announcement, my mother’s obituary, and the announcement of the land Hoyt sold to the electric company to put up windmills.

Nothing. Oh dear God. Nothing.

It had been twelve days since I’d run. And it didn’t seem like he’d even gone to the police.

I sat in the chair a little bit longer because my legs felt like jelly, my arms useless spaghetti noodles. There was no big search underway for me.

I had never made a will, but I imagine if he claimed abandonment or whatever, he could do what he wanted with the land. I had no idea how these things worked. But he was my husband after all. No one would argue with him.

This was the best possible outcome of my leaving. There would be no fuss. No scene of him in front of reporters with flashing cameras, pretending to cry, pretending to care.

But it meant that I’d vanished…everything I’d been. Twenty-four years of being alive, of being a daughter and a student and a member of a church. Of working, sweating, crying, laughing as Annie McKay. Gone.

No one missed me. Or worried. Or wondered. I’d vanished and the world just kept on spinning.

That no one seemed to be searching for me was a relief. Yet behind the relief…there was something else. Something I couldn’t look at yet.