Chapter 1
June
My name is June Kelly.
I say it to myself in the rearview mirror before I get out of the car, the way I've said it every day for four months, the way you'd practice a line before an audition you couldn't afford to flub.
June Kelly. Freelance graphic designer. No family to speak of, or none I mention.
Moves around a lot for work, likes small towns, doesn't stay anywhere too long.
All of that is true, technically, if you squint.
I am a graphic designer. I do move around a lot.
I don't stay anywhere too long. The reasons are just slightly different from the ones I give the nice woman at the front desk, and by slightly I mean entirely, and by entirely I mean if she knew the real reasons she'd call the police, and the police are exactly who I can't risk calling, because I don't know anymore who the police actually work for.
That's the part nobody warns you about, when your life turns into a thing you have to run from.
It's not just the fear of the person hunting you.
It's the slower, colder fear that eats at everything else — every institution you were raised to believe would help you, every number you were told to call in an emergency, all of it going gray and uncertain, because the one time you trusted the system to protect you, the system had a leak in it, and the leak nearly got you killed.
So now I trust exactly nobody, and I've built an entire second self to survive that decision — a woman named June who smiles at the right moments and answers to a name that isn't hers and has gotten frighteningly good at making a lie sound like a life.
Four months ago I had an apartment, a cat I had to give to my sister because I couldn't take him with me, and a job I liked at a firm that made logos for craft breweries.
I had a favorite coffee shop and a gym membership I barely used and a group text with two college friends that I haven't answered in four months because answering it would mean explaining where I am, and explaining where I am is the one thing I can never do again.
I think about my sister sometimes, more than I let myself dwell on.
She has my cat, a gray tabby named Biscuit who used to sleep on my feet every night, and she has no idea why I called her at eleven at night in March and told her, in a voice I didn't recognize as my own, that I needed her to take him and not ask questions and not tell anyone, ever, that I'd called.
She cried. I didn't let myself. I've had four months to cry since and I still haven't, not properly, like the tears are waiting for permission I haven't figured out how to give myself.
Four months ago I saw something I was never supposed to see, in a building I was never supposed to be in that late, and now I have a duffel bag, a car with Ohio plates I'm three states past where they'd expect me, and a name that isn't mine.
Clover Ridge is stop number six. I picked it off a map with my finger, more or less, looking for the smallest dot I could find that still had a grocery store.
Small towns are good. Small towns notice new faces, which sounds bad until you realize it also means small towns notice unfamiliar faces that don't belong — the wrong kind of stranger.
In a city, anyone could be watching me. In a town like this, if someone came looking, they'd stick out fast.
That's the theory, anyway. The theory has held five times. I'm hoping it holds a sixth.
Stop one was a motel outside Columbus, three nights, cash, no name on anything I didn't have to sign.
Stop two was a cousin of a friend's spare room in a town in Kentucky I couldn't find on a map again if I tried, until the friend mentioned my situation to one too many people and I decided a friend of a friend's discretion wasn't a foundation I trusted my life to.
Stop three, four, and five blur together now — a rented room here, a week in a chain hotel there, always paying cash, always watching the parking lot, always ready to be gone before the sun came up if something felt wrong.
I've gotten good at feeling wrong things.
Too good, maybe. There were nights in stop four when I convinced myself a delivery truck idling outside was a stakeout, packed my whole bag, and sat in the dark for two hours before I let myself unpack again.
That's not a life. That's barely survival with better shoes.
Clover Ridge is supposed to be different.
Smaller than anywhere I've stopped yet, tucked up against a ridge line that turns the whole town green and close and hidden, the kind of place where the biggest news of the week is probably a fender bender or a church bake sale.
I need small. I need boring. I need a town where I can disappear into the wallpaper long enough to figure out what my life is supposed to look like now that the old one isn't an option anymore.
The room above the hardware store is small and smells like sawdust and something floral the previous tenant left behind, and it has exactly one window and one door, which I check are both securely locked within ninety seconds of walking in, because that's a habit now, not a choice.
I put my duffel on the bed. I don't unpack it.
I never fully unpack anymore. Four months of practice has taught me that unpacking is a promise you might not get to keep.
I let myself breathe. Just once, just a little.
The room is quiet. The street below is quiet.
Nobody followed me here — I checked, the way I always check, doubling back twice on the drive in, watching my mirrors until my eyes ached.
Nobody knows June Kelly exists, because June Kelly didn't exist four months ago either.
For about six hours, Clover Ridge feels like exactly what I was hoping for. A gap. A breath. A town small enough to hide in and quiet enough to hear myself think, which I haven't done properly since March.
I walk the main street that evening, cataloging exits the way I do everywhere now — which alley connects to which street, which shop has a back door, how far it is from the room above the hardware store to my car if I need to move fast. It's exhausting, running that math in every new place, but it's also the only thing standing between me and the particular kind of mistake that gets a person found.
I've made that mistake before. I don't intend to make it twice.
The town itself is pretty in a way I'd probably appreciate more if I weren't treating every storefront like a potential blind spot.
Window boxes full of early flowers. A church with a steeple that looks freshly painted.
A diner with a hand-lettered sign advertising pie, which is the first thing in four months that's made my stomach growl instead of clench.
I go in for dinner because I have to eat somewhere, and because a woman who never eats in public looks stranger than a woman who does.
The diner's warm and a little loud, full of the particular hum of a small town's evening regulars, and for a few minutes over a plate of eggs and toast I let myself pretend I'm just a person having dinner, instead of a person calculating the distance to the door between bites.
Then I notice the man.
He's at the diner the next morning, at a corner table, and I only clock him because I clock everyone — it's not optional anymore, my brain runs the scan whether I want it to or not.
Tall through the shoulders even sitting down, dark hair, quiet in a way that isn't shy, more like he's got better things to do than perform being interesting.
He's got a coffee he's not drinking fast and a newspaper he's not reading closely, and both of those things put my teeth on edge, because that's exactly what surveillance looks like when it's done by somebody who's good at it.
I catch his eyes once, by accident, and he doesn't look away.
Most men look away, caught staring. Embarrassed half-smile, sudden interest in their phone. This one just holds my gaze for a second — assessing, not leering, nothing about it feels like a come-on — and then goes back to his paper like nothing happened.
My hands are shaking slightly when I pick up my coffee cup. I make them stop. I've gotten good at making them stop.
I tell myself it's nothing. Small towns have quiet men in corners.
Not every quiet man is a threat. I repeat that like a prayer through breakfast and through the walk back to my room and through an entire restless night where I keep the lamp on low and my shoes on the floor by the bed, laced, ready.
The next day, I see him again. Different corner of a different place — outside the general store this time, leaning against a truck, not doing anything specific, just present. Our eyes catch again. Same thing. He doesn't look away first.
By the third day, I've built an entire case against him in my head.
He's not local police, too watchful for that, too still.
Could be private. Could be one of Devlin Marsh's people — Marsh has resources, Marsh has patience, Marsh has already proven he's willing to spend money finding one inconvenient witness.
I've seen what that money buys firsthand.
It bought someone on the inside of the very system that was supposed to keep me safe, and it nearly cost me everything the night I found out.
So I don't dismiss a quiet man in a corner just because he hasn't done anything yet. Nothing is exactly what the man who compromised my first safe house did, right up until it wasn't nothing anymore.
I run through my exit plan in my head while I pretend to look at postcards I'll never send: car's parked two blocks over, keys in my jacket pocket where they always are, duffel's never fully unpacked, I could be gone in four minutes if it came to that.
Four minutes has been enough before. It's going to have to be enough again if it comes to it.