Chapter 3
JENNA
Iwake up all at once, no drift, no warmth of slow consciousness. One second: nothing. The next: ceiling, walls, door, window. My eyes do the circuit before the rest of me catches up.
I sit up and put my feet on the floor.
The apartment is studio-sized, cheaper than anything in this neighborhood has a right to be. The discount comes from the location—back corner, second floor, the unit that shares a wall with the laundry room. Previous tenants hated the vibration. I liked it immediately.
I did the rest myself. Furniture from a single trip to a thrift store three blocks over: one bed frame with a mattress, one table, two chairs.
Nothing decorative. Nothing that would require a second trip to move.
The kitchen holds exactly what I need. I’ve lived here for four months, and it still looks like someone just moved in.
The window has a secondary lock I fitted myself, plus a wedge alarm on the inside sill. The front door has a chain I added and a doorstop wedged under the handle when I sleep. Neither would stop someone who really wanted in. They’d slow them down enough that I’d hear it. That’s all I need. Time.
I stand, roll my shoulders, and check my hands automatically. The knuckles of my right hand are bruised from Thursday’s training session at the fight club I joined. I flex them once, feel the pull and give of healing tissue, and move to the kitchen to fill a glass of water.
The morning check takes forty seconds. Door: chain on, wedge in place. Window above the sink: locked, alarm armed, the strip of tape I replace every week still unbroken across the gap between sash and frame. I’ve done it so many times the sequence lives in my hands rather than my head.
My stepfather used to lock doors too. The difference is I lock mine to keep people out.
The go-bag under the bed holds three days of supplies, a change of clothes, two prepaid phones, and $600 in cash split between two envelopes. The second bag lives behind the water heater access panel in the bathroom. I know their weight by feel. Nothing is missing. Nothing is shifted.
I’ve kept go-bags like this since I was seventeen.
Since the night I left my stepfather in that basement with a fire poker through his gut.
I made the choice. I didn’t stay to find out if I’d killed him or just broken him.
I took the cash from his wallet and stuffed a few belongings into a bag, and I walked fifteen miles to a truck stop before the sun came up.
Three years and four cities later, I still don’t know if I killed him or broke him.
There’s no version of looking it up that doesn’t put me back on a grid he could find me on, so I don’t look.
I assume he survived. I assume he’s looking.
I assume the police might be looking too—for me, not for him, because that’s how it usually goes with the kind of man my stepfather was and the kind of girl I was at seventeen.
Three things to be afraid of. The man, his memory, and the law. I live the way you live when all three are after you.
The not-knowing is the heaviest part.
I’ve been here at least two months longer than I should have stayed. The neighborhood has learned my face. The guy at the corner store nods when I come in. The woman in 2C said good morning last Tuesday, and I answered before I could stop myself. Small things. They accumulate.
I need to start looking for the next place.
I shower fast and cold—I’ve been doing that for three years now. Hot water relaxes muscles, and relaxed muscles slow reaction time.
The mirror above the sink shows me what I need to see: no obvious injuries, eyes clear, nothing that would make someone look twice. I don’t linger. A face is just a face until you start treating it like it matters.
Clothes come from the middle of the closet.
The middle houses the boring, unremarkable clothes: a gray long-sleeve shirt, dark jeans, a brown jacket that’s a size too large and had cost me twelve dollars at Goodwill in a different zip code.
The cut is shapeless. The color exists in that particular register of beige-adjacent brown that the human eye skates straight over.
That’s the whole point.
No jewelry. Shoes are dark, rubber-soled, broken in enough to be silent on pavement. The laces are double-knotted. I check them twice.
I look like someone unremarkable on their way to a shift somewhere.
The walk to work is forty-one minutes. I leave ninety minutes early and route each walk differently.
I take the long way out of the building first—down the back stairwell, through the side exit that deposits me on the cross street rather than the main avenue.
Outside, the air is cold and flat, smelling like car exhaust and approaching rain.
I start walking.
Blue Honda Civic, same parking spot as yesterday, same parking spot as the day before—resident.
A Con-Ed van on the corner of Wacker has been there since Tuesday.
I’ve checked the plates twice. They match the utility company’s registered fleet.
Still, I cross to the opposite sidewalk when I pass it.
Old habit.
The couple outside the coffee shop on Michigan—laptops open, paper cups, the particular brand of loud-talking intimacy that only happens when people feel completely unwatched.
A man walking his dog, phone to his ear, the dog straining left while the man drifts right.
A woman in a yellow coat is swiping her transit card against the card reader, already thinking about something else.
Normal. All of it normal.
I turn left two blocks earlier than I need to and walk the long diagonal through the small park, cutting through the open space the way a fish moves in open water—not to get somewhere faster, but to see if anything follows.
Nobody does. A jogger passes me heading north.
A woman with a stroller camps near the fountain. I note both.
There are three exits from this park. I know all three, and I know what each one opens onto: a main street, a service alley that runs to a parking structure, a narrow pedestrian cut between two buildings that comes out on a quieter block. My childhood home had one exit. My stepfather knew it too.
I grew up mapping every room I was ever locked in. I just do it outside now. Bigger rooms. Same math.
The difference is I tell myself I’m not scared anymore, that this is a strategy rather than fear. Some days I almost believe it.
The thought slides in before I can catch it.
Will this ever stop? Will there ever be a morning when I just walk?
I kill it quickly, like pulling your hand off a hot surface. Not because the answer hurts. It’s just that the question is a luxury, and luxuries make you slow.
The pharmacy smells like antiseptic, floor wax, and the particular flatness of recycled air. My shift starts and continues uneventfully.
The fluorescent lights are doing their thing overhead—that faint, almost-inaudible hum that lives below the threshold of consciousness. I’m behind the counter, counting a restock of blister packs into their correct bins.
Priya appears at my elbow, her lanyard swinging, with a hopeful expression on her face that warns me I’m about to receive another invitation I’ll decline.
“We’re doing that escape room thing Saturday,” she says. “The murder mystery one over on Clark. Like, eight people so far, and it’s actually more fun with more.” A pause. “You should come.”
“I can’t.” I don’t elaborate.
“You always say that.”
“I know.” I keep my eyes on the bins. “I’m sorry, Priya.”
She doesn’t say anything for a moment. When I glance up, she’s nodding in that particular way people nod when they’re swallowing disappointment.
She leaves without pushing it, and I feel the guilt settle in my chest like sediment—quiet, familiar, useless.
I couldn’t go. She doesn’t know what she’s asking.
Dev is running the register at the far end of the counter. We work beside each other most shifts, and he’s never once asked me about my personal life. I don’t know if that’s by nature or design, but it feels comfortable.
Around two in the morning, he says, without looking up from his receipt tape, “You ever think about just leaving? Like, the city. Not going anywhere specific. Just gone.”
“Yeah.” It comes out before I weigh it.
He nods. “Me too.”
We don’t say anything else. It’s close to a conversation, the closest we get, and I feel the edges of what might’ve been friendship, in another life, where I was someone different.
The dead zone hits at three and holds until five. I’ve learned the shape of it.
Dev clocked out at 2:45. The overnight manager, a tired man named Glen who communicates mostly through grunts and clipboard gestures, disappears into the back office around three and stays there.
The store doesn’t close—the pharmacy never closes—but the customers thin to almost nothing.
A man in a puffy coat buys NyQuil at 3:12.
A woman who might be a nurse, still in scrubs, picks up a prescription at 3:40. After that: nothing.
Just me and the hum.
I restock what doesn’t need restocking because moving is better than standing still, and standing still in fluorescent light at four in the morning does something to a person’s head.
The lights here are the industrial kind—bright without warmth, illuminating everything and flattering nothing.
I’ve spent hours under them, and I still can’t decide if they feel safer than the dark or just a different sense of discomfort.
The security camera in the corner above the cold medicine aisle has a slow sweep. I’ve timed it. Twenty-two seconds from left to right, pause, back again. I tracked it the first week without meaning to, just noticed. Logged it. Couldn’t stop.
I straighten a row of antacid boxes that are already straight.
Is this it?
The thought arrives without fanfare. Not dramatic, not despairing. I’m twenty years old. I work nights in a pharmacy that smells like antiseptic. I go home to an apartment I’ve already mentally packed up. I have no one who would notice immediately if I didn’t come back.
I am safe. I built this. Piece by piece, address by address, door lock by door lock. This is the thing I strived toward.
And it’s a box. A clean, well-lit, thoroughly secured box.
My chest tightens, and I put the antacid boxes down.
Wanting is the problem. Wanting gets you moving in directions you can’t control, toward people you can’t protect yourself from. I know what it costs to want things.
I pick up the antacid boxes again.
The hum continues overhead. The camera sweeps left.
The day shift workers filter in—first the stock clerk, a kid named Omar, then the pharmacist, then finally Becca, who takes over the front counter from me with the energy of someone who has slept and can’t imagine why everyone else looks like they haven’t.
“Long night?” Becca asks, already pulling her hair into a ponytail.
“Quiet.” I start counting down my register.
“You okay? You look—” She tilts her head. “I don’t know. You’ve been off lately.”
I keep my eyes on the bills. “I’m fine. Just tired.”
“You’re always just tired.” She says it lightly, no edge to it. That’s the worst kind—the gentle noticing. “You should come to Priya’s thing Saturday.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
She knows it’s a no. I can tell by the way she stops pushing and busies herself with the schedule clipboard instead. I finish the count, log it, and sign out before she can circle back.
The bathroom at the back of the pharmacy is single-occupancy with a lock that actually works.
I change fast—work shirt off, plain black long-sleeve on, jacket over it.
Different shoes from the bag: a worn pair of white sneakers that don’t match anything the overnight counter girl was wearing.
If anyone clocked me coming in, they won’t clock me going out.
Outside, the city is halfway through becoming itself again.
The commuter crowd moves in one direction—into the mouth of it, into the trains and lobbies and revolving doors—and I move against the current, toward sleep while everyone else wakes up.
A man in a good coat checks his phone without breaking stride.
Two women share earbuds, laughing at something.
A kid in a school uniform drags his backpack along the pavement like a punishment.
Normal. All of it is so straightforwardly normal that a part of me goes quiet looking at it.
They’re going somewhere. Toward something. Probably a dozen small somethings—a desk, a coffee, a person who’ll ask how they slept and actually want an answer.
I watch them for a half-block, and then I stop watching, because the watching isn’t useful.
I know what I am. I made myself this way on purpose. The logic still holds.
I take the first turn, and the crowd thins immediately—a side street, quieter, lined with delivery trucks starting their rounds. I run the usual route variation without thinking: two blocks south before I cut west, then north again, adding seven minutes to a walk I could do in forty-one.
But somewhere around the third block, the feeling arrives.
It’s nothing I can point at. More like a change in air pressure. The sense of a room shifting when someone enters it, except I’m outside and there’s no room and there’s no one I can identify.
I stop at a crosswalk and use the wait to turn casually, scan back down the block.
A delivery driver offloading boxes. An older woman with a cart. A car idling at the curb—silver, a Camry or something close to it—engine running, no one visibly getting in or out.
I’ve seen a silver Camry. My mind starts reaching for the specific memory, only to find it blurred. I can’t be sure. Silver Camrys exist everywhere.
The light changes. I cross.
I run the checks the rest of my journey home. Window reflections. Stopping to tie a lace that doesn’t need tying. Taking the long entry to the building, through the back, pausing in the stairwell to listen before going up.
Nothing. Nobody.
You always feel this way.
I do. That’s the honest answer. The hypervigilance doesn’t take days off, doesn’t distinguish between a real threat and an empty street at six in the morning. It fires on everything, or it fires on nothing, and I’ve long since lost the calibration that would tell me which is which.
The apartment is exactly as I left it. Both bags are undisturbed. Both locks are intact. The tape on the window: still unbroken.
I do the full check anyway—closet, bathroom, under the bed—and then I shed the jacket and sit on the edge of the mattress and let the familiar weight of the space settle around me. Four walls I chose. Locks I installed. A life I can fold up and move in under an hour.
Safe.
I go to the window, stand to the side of it, and look down at the street.
The silver Camry isn’t there.
I let the curtain fall back.
The feeling doesn’t leave