"And the apartment?"
"There's a rooming house on 37th Street that rents by the week to agency staff. I'll book it through a service so my name isn't anywhere. And Charlotte — " Nora's voice changed, softened in a way it did only a few times a year. "The hair. Gray worked in — you'd be amazed how gray makes a woman disappear. And your hands. Your hands are a CEO's hands. No polish, cut the nails to nothing, and there's a cream — the girls on the floors will read your hands before your face."
Charlotte looked down at her hands on the desk: the manicure, the single gold band she had never replaced since the divorce. She began, slowly, to twist the ring off her finger, and set it in the top drawer of her desk, on top of the audit report, where it caught the lamplight.
"Already ahead of you," she said.
"You are not ahead of me. Nobody is ahead of me; I contain the plan. One more rule, and this one is mine." Nora waited until she was sure she had her. "You check in with me every night. Text, from Carmen's phone — I'll get you a phone. If you miss a night, I come to Savannah. Not a lawyer, not a auditor. Me, personally, in the lobby, saying your whole name to the front desk. Do you understand me?"
"I understand you."
"And if this man touches you, or corners you, or — "
"Then someone is in danger," Charlotte said gently, "and we already have a rule for that."
When she hung up, the office felt larger and quieter, the way a room does when a decision has been made in it. Charlotte sat a while longer with the letters. Then she gathered them — carefully, in order — and put them in her bag, not the drawer. She would be taking them with her. Not as evidence. As company. As the three people she was going to work for, for the next two weeks, at a wage she intended to experience down to the last docked dollar.
Before she left, she called her daughter. It rang four times — Chicago, two hours behind her conscience — and Isabela answered with the particular brightness she used at the end of long days.
"Mom. It's eleven your time. Why do I hear office in your voice?"
"You hear nothing. I'm horizontal. I'm practically a spa already." Charlotte smiled at the dark window. "I'm taking some time, baby. Two weeks, starting Monday. Off the grid, phone off, the whole performance. If you need me, Nora knows the emergency spell. I just wanted to hear you before I go quiet."
"Two weeks of quiet from you. Should I be worried or should I send flowers to the spa?"
"Send the flowers to Nora. She's the one who'll need them."
Isabela laughed, and then — because she was her mother's daughter, and both of them could hear the weather change in a voice the way other people heard rain — she said, more carefully, "You sound like you're about to do something brave and stupid."
"I sound like that most days. It's my resting sound."
"Mom — "
"I love you," Charlotte said. "Go to bed. I'll be back before you have time to get properly annoyed at me."
She set the phone down, and turned off the lamp, and stood in the dark office above the river of lights, fifty-five years old and about to become nobody, and felt — beneath the fear, beneath the guilt about the lying — something she had not felt in years, clean and simple as a drawn breath.
Purpose, with her sleeves rolled up.
The bus for Savannah left the Atlanta station at five-forty in the morning, in a dark so complete it still counted as night.
Charlotte arrived in a taxi she paid for in cash, carrying a single duffel bag — navy, scuffed, bought for cash at a discount store where the cashier had not looked at her face once, a small preview of invisibility that had steadied her more than any reassurance. Inside the duffel: three changes of clothes with the labels cut out, a pair of shoes already broken to her feet, a paperback novel with a cracked spine, Carmen's phone, and, folded inside a plastic grocery bag at the very bottom, three letters on lined notebook paper, going home to the women who had written them.
The gray had gone into her hair on Sunday, in Nora's bathroom, both of them laughing in the helpless way people laugh at funerals and hair disasters, Nora's gloved hands working the color through while the radio played old soul. It had aged her ten years and unburdened her of twenty. The glasses were plain, clear-lensed, bought off a rack. Her nails were cut to nothing. She wore no ring, no watch, no earrings; the little gold studs she had worn every day since she was thirty sat in a dish on her dresser like two small deposed coins.