And she made the only decision available to her, which was the wrong one.

She went to Evelyn.

Part Four: Chamomile

It took her two hours to go four miles.

She walked to a laundromat on the corner and sat in the back of it for twenty minutes because she was going to faint if she didn’t, and a woman folding sheets looked at her bare feet and her white face and asked if she needed an ambulance, and Maya said no, thank you, I’m fine, which is the sentence that has probably killed more women than any other in the English language.

She took two buses using a transit card she found in the pocket of a coat hanging on the wall of the laundromat’s lost-and-found bin, which was theft, and which she thought about for years afterward with more guilt than anything else that happened that night.