At the hospital entrance I paid a delivery courier fifty dollars to carry my leather purse to a coffee shop on the north side.

While the tracker in my bag drifted away toward the wrong end of the city, I took a cab to our house in Oak Brook.

It was a small thing, that decoy, and improvising it in the cold at dawn I felt almost foolish — a woman who taught herself spycraft from panic and a fifty-dollar bill.

But it was also the first decision in five years I had made entirely on my own, without narrating it to Devon first, without watching his face to see whether I was allowed.

My whole marriage had been a slow surrender of exactly this: the right to move through the world without permission, to go somewhere without an explanation ready.

And now, watching that blue dot slide away from me on a map I couldn’t see, I understood that the marriage had not been a marriage at all.