It was so different from where I was from, seven hours to the west. Widow Hills, Kentucky, was perfectly nice, with tree-lined streets and cookie-cutter houses that backed to the woods, but nothing new had come to the area in at least two generations. It seemed no one wanted to put a business in a place called Widow Hills.

Nothing bad had happened in Widow Hills to give it the name. It was, up until my accident, a very safe place to live. At least that’s what the articles all said.

Living in Central Valley required more of an active process. It attracted a certain type of person, outdoorsy and weatherproof. Who would trade convenience for adventure. Stability for curiosity.

But here. Here, I told the potential hires, you could ski and hike and tube down the river. Here, you could discover something—about this place and yourself. Here, you could be the person you always imagined you might be.

Say it enough, and you might convince yourself, too.

Every day on my way in to work, I’d pass a house with a forsale sign in the yard. Every day I caught sight of something new as the leaves changed and fell. A bird feeder. A balcony from a second-floor window. A set of slate stepping stones through the open grass field.

Something about it called out to me. Reminded me of the ghost of that first house, with my mom and me. Before the cameras and the money. Before the move to a generic suburb with a white picket fence—the first in a series of steps that would bring us several states north but eventually circle us back to nowhere.

When the consulting assignment was finished, and I accepted the job but lost the subsidized housing, the first place I thought to call was the number on that sign.

Jonah had seen it once when I’d first moved in, laughed under his breath, and declared I’d gone full-country. I said I was only a handful of miles from the town center, as the crow flies. He said the fact that I now used the term as the crow flies only proved his point.

I’d spent enough of my time unraveling the things he said and meant. Trying to decide whether it was a critique of me or of him. Whether his words meant anything at all other than a way to pass the time.

I dressed early for the day. Slipped on my shoes. Tied my hair in a quick bun. Cleaned the blood from the crevices of my wood floor on my way out.

I decided to ignore the text.

THERE WAS A TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR grocery-slash-convenience store three blocks from the hospital, where my road intersected with the rest of civilization—one of the few places native to the town. It was called Grocery and More, and there was no name more fitting. Here, you could get dinner and packing tape; a magazine and a box of nails; Advil and wine. The owners understood the importance of a twenty-four-hour one-stop shop when servicing hospital personnel with nontraditional hours.

It was just barely before seven a.m. when I pulled into the lot. There were a couple of cars scattered throughout, but nothing like the afternoon crowd.

Inside, there was faint classical music playing. It was a time warp not only in that you could never tell what time of day it was in the bright fluorescent-lit interior, but also because of the layout. There was a spinning rack of chips beside an aisle of unfinished lumber and hardware. Fruit and ice cream in refrigerated bins around the corner. A coffee station next to the checkout area. One clerk working the early shift, watching a TV behind the counter, which was tuned to an old black-and-white western with the sound off. He tipped his head to me when the door soundlessly swished closed, sealing us back inside.

I picked up a basket beside the entrance and went straight for the hardware aisle. The sleepwalking was probably a one-time thing, but it wouldn’t hurt to add a lock.

Everything was a balance: A few extra seconds spent unhooking this lock in a fire could be deadly. But so could turning on the stove in my sleep. Walking into the road. Getting hit. Getting lost. Falling.

The hook-and-eye latches were buried under a mismatched assortment of locks and hinges, but I finally got one in my basket. I’d just turned out of the aisle when I collided with another shopper.

“Oh—”

“Shit, sorry,” the other woman said.

Our baskets had caught, and we set them on the ground to disentangle them.

She hadn’t looked up yet, but I recognized her. Almost-whiteblond hair pulled back in a ponytail, sharp angled cheekbones. Someone from the hospital, but she was out of uniform, and it always took my mind another second to catch up. Scrolling through a list of faces, removing the stethoscopes, the name tags, the scrubs. This was Dr. Britton in the emergency department. Sydney. “Hey. Hi, Sydney. Sorry about this.”

She stood slowly, her basket hooked on her arm, indentation already forming in her pale skin, weighed down by the microwave lasagna and the bottle of red. “Liv? God, I’m sorry. I didn’t even notice it was you.” She raised her arm slightly, the basket swaying. “Just getting off work. I make no excuses.”

She eyed my basket—empty except for the hook-and-eye latch—and then rubbed her eyes with her free hand. “Sorry, if I don’t get out of here soon, I’ll crash before the microwave finishes. And I’ve got a marathon of Law & Order waiting for me.”

“Enjoy,” I said. Then I turned down the next aisle, spent a few moments trying to remember the type of liquor in Rick’s cabinet. Settled on a bottle of dark rum that looked the same shape and shade—as a thank-you, and as an apology.

I stopped for a coffee before paying.

“Quite the eclectic basket you’ve got here,” the checkout clerk said. He was cheerful and soft and of indeterminate age, somewhere between twenty-five and forty. But his smile was contagious, even this early in the morning.

He scanned the hook-and-eye lock, rang up the coffee I’d just poured myself beside the counter.

“Hey, it’s your store,” I said. I, too, made no excuses.

He laughed once, loud and sharp, then paused at the liquor, looked from the bottle label to me, then back. “ID?”

I pulled it from my wallet, and he took it from my hand, squinting.

Something fell in the aisle behind me. The sound of boxes tumbling off their stack. I turned, smiling, expecting to see Sydney, clumsy with fatigue. How you can get with lack of sleep. Disoriented. Slow to react. But instead I saw a man in jeans and a short-sleeved button-down, ball cap on, tuck himself away behind the spinning rack of chips.

My smile fell, my shoulders tensed.

I thought, from the way he seemed to be watching, that maybe it was someone I knew. But there was something else. A long-cultivated instinct.

It was the way he was standing—half-hidden—that made my skin prickle. The way he turned back to the chips, spinning the rack but looking at nothing. A feeling I hadn’t gotten in a long time: a feeling that meant they were looking for me.

It made sense: On the ten-year anniversary a decade earlier, the journalists had come out of the woodwork. In supermarket aisles, outside the high school entrance, resting against the side of our neighbor’s house. Manifesting from structures all over town like something out of a horror movie.

I’d been sixteen, a junior in high school. I saw my English teacher interviewed on the news, saying I was a good kid, a solid student, a little quiet, but who could blame me. My mom went on a talk show—it was an offer we couldn’t turn down, she said, though I refused to join her. They showed our new house on the news. Blurred out the numbers, as if that mattered. Used my picture from the yearbook.