The jacket pocket had twenty-two dollars in it and a stick of gum.

Part Five: The Classified

She spent that night in the twenty-four-hour waiting area of the central bus terminal, in a plastic chair bolted to the floor, in a room with eleven other people who were also not going anywhere.

At six in the morning she went into the terminal’s public restroom and looked at her incision under fluorescent light and understood that she was in trouble.

Three staples had pulled through.