7:10, and the street's the color of dishwater.

I come down to move the Corolla before the sweeper gets it, keys in one hand, coffee I don't have in the other because I spent the coffee money on a factory reset and a strip of tape, and I'm halfway to the driver's door when the alley from last night walks back into my head uninvited — the grey car, unlocked, empty, the laminated permit swinging on its little chain — and something in me that has never once done this before makes me stop, and crouch, and put my hand flat on the cold asphalt, and look underneath my own car.

I've never checked under my own car in my life. Thirty-one years old and it has never once occurred to me that I might need to.

The gravel bites through my jeans at the knee. Sandy grit, a bottle cap, a smear of old oil striping the pavement like a shadow that stayed. I go down on both knees to see better, forearms braced, chin nearly to the curb, and for a second all I register is normal — undercarriage, rust blooming lace-thin along the frame, a hanging strip of plastic guard my father would've fixed in ten minutes flat with a zip tie he kept in his overalls pocket.

Then I see it.

Above the rear tire, tucked into the wheel well where the metal curves up out of sight unless you're exactly where I am, exactly this low — a black plastic box the size of a deck of cards, held flush to the frame by its own magnet, furred grey with road film.

The street tilts.

Not metaphor. My hand goes out flat against the tire to catch myself, the way you'd steady against a wall that turned out not to be load-bearing, and for three or four seconds Doyle Avenue actually seems to lean, the parked cars sliding half an inch sideways in my vision before my inner ear catches up and puts the world back where it belongs.

I don't need to take it down to know what it is. I already know. I know before my fingers touch the seam of it, before I see the tape — I know the way you know a smell before your brain names it, which is to say underneath language entirely, in the part of the body that keeps its own records.

But then I see the tape, and the knowing becomes a fact instead of a feeling.

Blue electrical tape, wound twice around the seam where the case halves meet, the ends folded under themselves in a neat little tab so it peels clean instead of tearing — that exact fold, that exact economy, a habit and not an accident, because Trevor taped everything that way. The lamp cord behind the couch. The router, so the cat we never got wouldn't chew it. My bike light, the winter it kept slipping its bracket. The cardboard backing on a picture frame, the one that broke in January five years ago and put a two-inch scar on my forearm that I've been calling a picture frame ever since, like the frame did it by itself.

Same roll. Same fold. Same hands.

I sit down.

Not gracefully — I just stop being able to crouch and end up on the curb with my back against the Corolla's rear bumper and the device in both hands, turning it over like it might explain itself if I look at it from a different angle, and the dirt on it isn't fresh. It's old dirt, laid down in strata, a paler ring where road salt dried and re-wet and dried again, which means it's been there through at least one winter, maybe two, and I do the math without wanting to.

February 2021. The month I signed the lease on Doyle Avenue. Three years and seven months of driving to Simone's, to client meetings, to the clinic that one time, to Cranston and back for gravy I didn't want to eat, and every single one of those miles has been sitting in a file somewhere with a timestamp on it, and I never once looked under my own car because it never once occurred to me that leaving him meant anything less than actually leaving.

I recalculate the whole of my independence in about eleven seconds. Every apartment I thought was mine alone. Every night I told Simone I needed space and drove nowhere in particular just to feel like the car was mine. The six months of walking to Atwells Avenue at 7:40 because walking felt safer than driving, and it turns out walking was the only part of my life that was actually private, and even that I'm not sure of anymore.

I get my knuckles under the edge of the magnet and pull, and it fights me — three and a half years of practice holding on — and it scrapes a line of skin off across two knuckles before it lets go all at once with a small ugly click, and I sit there on the curb with a bleeding hand and a dead man's leash in my lap.

I don't keep it, though some careful version of me wants to. I walk it to the storm drain at the corner and drop it through the grate, and it lands somewhere below with a small wet sound, because some part of me needs it gone from my hands before I can think about what it means.

I don't call the police. I stand on the sidewalk holding that thought and turning it over, and it resolves into one sentence, flat and complete: he is the police.

Upstairs, grit still ground into both knees of my jeans, I text Simone one line — found a tracker under my car, don't call yet, I need a minute — and within ninety seconds my phone is buzzing in my hand, her name lit up, and I let it ring. Three times. I stand in the middle of forty-one houseplants with dirt still drying gray on my palms and I let my best friend's concern go straight to voicemail because I don't have language yet for what I need to say.

And underneath the fear, quieter, uglier, there's this: Dominic asked me for my Sundays last night. Tomorrow, I told him. Tomorrow nobody will know where I am — not him, not Simone, and until seven minutes ago I would have said not Trevor either, and there's a relief in that thought so large it frightens me more than the tracker did, because I recognize the shape of it. It's the shape of wanting to disappear so completely that not even love can find you.

The phone rings again.

Not Simone. A Boston area code I deleted on the third of January, three years and eight months ago, and never once forgot, because some numbers live behind your teeth whether you want them there or not.

I answer it. I don't say anything.

"Maya." His voice is exactly the same — warm, unhurried, the voice of a man reading you a bedtime story about your own inadequacies. "Your mom mentioned you've been having a hard time. Are you eating?"

I don't answer that either. My thumb finds the torn skin on my knuckle and presses it, just to have something real to hold onto.

"I only ask," Trevor says, in the same reasonable tone, like he's noting the weather, "because I drove past Atwells Avenue Thursday night. Around eight-fifty. You were coming out of the alley behind that cafe."

The room goes very still around me, plants and all.

"Who is he, Maya," he says, quieter now, patient, the way he always got quieter right before something in the apartment ended up broken.

I stand there with the tracker zipped in one pocket and the phone pressed hard enough to my ear to hurt, and I don't say a word.