The car was old and beautiful and black, the kind of thing built when men still made machines to look carved rather than assembled. The woman in gray drove it herself, gloved hands easy on the wheel. She did not offer Elaine the front seat so much as fail to prevent her from taking it.
They went down the mountain in silence at first. Elaine watched the trees thin and the stone gate disappear behind them. Somewhere beyond it, without a sound or visible boundary, the weight surrounding the estate simply... ended.
She felt it at once.
The silence she'd been wrapped in for four days loosened around her. The world seemed larger somehow, less sealed.
She was no longer hidden.
If anyone was looking...
They could find her now.
"You should stop looking at him the way that you do," the woman
