I heard them talking through the wall.

Victor and Harlan, in the study, three rooms from where I was sitting with a book I hadn't been reading for an hour.

"The policy pays out at two million," Harlan said. "But only if it's ruled accidental."

A pause.

"It will be ruled accidental," Victor said.

I put the book down.

I had known something was wrong for six months. The late calls. The new insurance policy he'd taken out in my name without mentioning it. The way he looked at me sometimes — not with the cold indifference that had replaced whatever he'd felt when we married, but something more calculated. Measuring.

I had told myself I was imagining it.

I had been wrong.

"The kitchen," Harlan said. "Old wiring. The inspector signed off on it three years ago — that report is on file. If there's a fire that starts in the kitchen while she's sleeping—"

I stood up.

I did not think. I moved.

Down the hall. Out the side door. Into the November night in my socks, no coat, my phone on the nightstand where I'd left it because I had not expected to need it.

I stood on the cold lawn and looked at the house.

The house where I'd lived for three years as Victor Crane's wife. The house where I'd learned, slowly, that the man I married was not the man he'd presented himself to be. The house I'd been trying to figure out how to leave for eight months without losing everything in the process.

I didn't have to figure it out anymore.

He was going to burn it down with me in it.

I walked to the back of the property. Through the garden gate. Down the alley that ran behind the block.

I walked until I found a cab. I got in.

"Where to?" the driver said.

I thought about it.

"The bus station," I said.

I had forty dollars in the pocket of the sweatpants I was wearing. A wedding ring I took off in the cab and put in the other pocket. And the knowledge — specific, documented in my memory — of everything Victor and Harlan had said through the wall.

I was going to need all three.

The cab moved.

Behind me, three miles back, the light in the study was still on.

Victor was still planning.

I was already gone.

The only question was what I was going to do next.

I had all night to figure it out.

I started figuring.

The cab driver didn't ask questions.

That was the thing about cab drivers at midnight — they had learned, over years of picking up people with wet socks and no bags, that the story was usually something they didn't need to know.

I told him the bus station because the bus station was the place that would take me furthest fastest with the least need for documentation. I had forty dollars. The bus to the next major city left at one-fifteen. I knew this because I had been researching exit options for eight months — not seriously, I had told myself, just as an intellectual exercise, the kind of thing a person did when they lived with someone they weren't sure they could leave cleanly.

I had not been doing it as an intellectual exercise.

I had been doing it because some part of me had known.

The cab pulled up to the station at twelve forty-seven.

I paid with two twenties and got out.

Inside the station I sat on a plastic chair and looked at my hands — bare now, the ring in my pocket, the impression of it still on my finger — and I thought about what I'd heard through the wall.

*The policy pays out at two million. But only if it's ruled accidental.*

I had known Victor was in financial trouble. The conversations that stopped when I entered rooms, the calls he took outside, the new tension in how he reviewed contracts. I had filed it as stress, as business pressure, as the thing that happened to men who built companies and then found the companies harder to maintain than they'd expected.

I had not filed it as: he is planning to kill me for the money.

I should have filed it as that.

I was filing it as that now.

The bus left at one-fifteen, heading north.

I sat in a window seat and watched the city dissolve into highway and thought about what Harlan had said: *The inspector signed off on it three years ago — that report is on file.*

He had been planning this for at least three years.

Or Harlan had been.

The distinction mattered less than I'd expected it to.

I watched the dark highway.

I was going to need to think very clearly and I was going to need to start now.

I started.
I did not look back. Looking back was not part of what I was doing. I was going forward, with forty dollars and no coat and a plan that had not existed two hours ago. That was enough. It would have to be.