I walked to the office window and looked down at the driveway.

My SUV sat there in the pale light, exactly where I’d left it, waiting for me like an open grave.

If I had driven home the way a normal, unwarned woman drives home — if Winifred Alcott had kept to her own business in room 412, the way she had once kept to her own business and lost everything — I would have gotten into that car within the hour and pointed it toward a highway, and Devon would have worn a beautiful black suit to my funeral and let strangers bring him coffee.

I did not go near it.

I let myself out the back door, walked three houses down, and ordered a car from the sidewalk.

And then, standing under a stranger’s tree at six in the morning, I made the call I should have been allowed to make three years before.