Not a sudden burst of healing, not a wise friend’s advice, not the passage of enough time — just the plain cold fear of a woman who had caught sight of her own disappearance.

I was becoming one of the rooms I could not enter: still, sealed, preserved around an absence, waiting for something that was not coming.

And some stubborn animal part of me, the part that had kept getting up every morning for three years, refused.

It did not know what it wanted.

It only knew that it did not want to vanish, and that was, in the end, enough to get me into the car.

Chapter 4 — The Agency in Cincinnati