She had thirteen dollars, no identification, and an active interest in ceasing to exist for a while, and here was an advertisement offering a bed and meals in exchange for work, placed by someone who had gone out of their way to say that paperwork was negotiable.

She would think about that ad a great deal later.

She would think about how strange it was that a man of Harrison Vance’s means had placed a classified in a print newspaper at all, rather than going through an agency, and about how the ad had run for eleven consecutive days in three papers, and about which specific paper it was that she happened to pick up off a bench in the central bus terminal.

But that was later.