By that afternoon the hospital had transferred me to a private wing, registered under a different name, my care walled off behind privacy protections that my husband’s family had no way to breach.

Officially, on the system Flynn could get someone to check, the room I had been in was now empty.

I had, in effect, disappeared — but this time it was not the invisibility of a woman making herself small so a man could feel large.

This time it was the invisibility of a woman who has stepped behind cover to do her work, while the people hunting her go on searching a room she is no longer in.

There is a great difference between those two kinds of vanishing.

It took me seven years and a broken leg to learn it.