The Woman in Room 412
When he went down to the cafeteria for coffee, I hurried back to room 412.
“Check the lining of your purse,” Winifred ordered.
The honey-colored leather bag had been an anniversary gift from Devon.
I locked myself in the hospital bathroom, worked the inner seam open with the tweezers from my makeup kit, and found a small tracking tag sewn neatly into the lining.
And all at once his “casual” phone calls made a terrible kind of sense — the ones that came whenever I visited a friend, or lingered in a bookstore, or so much as mentioned a job offer.
It had never been intuition.