All of it — the coldness, the pressure, the six years of being slightly wrong about everything — had been real, and now she had proof, and nobody was ever going to be able to tell her she was imagining things again.

She got up.

She did not go out the window.

She had climbed one railing that night and her body had told her, in the clearest possible terms, that there would not be a second.

Instead she waited in the dark at the top of the stairs until she heard Evelyn go into the downstairs bathroom and shut the door, and then she went down the stairs one at a time on the outside edge where they don’t creak, and took a canvas jacket off the hook by the front door because it was cold, and let herself out the back door through the kitchen, and closed it behind her without letting the latch click.

She went out through the yard and over a low chain-link fence into the neighbor’s, and out to the street two houses down, and she was three blocks away when a car she recognized went past her going the other direction, fast.