Besides, he likes Alice. He likes the way she’s coming back. She’s had a couple of panic attacks, sure, but who wouldn’t have panic attacks after being drugged and gang raped? She hasn’t talked about going back to school, she hasn’t mentioned friends or acquaintances who might be concerned about her, and she hasn’t fretted about calling her mother （or maybe her sister, the hairdresser）。 He thinks that Alice is in a space of hiatus. She has put her life on pause while she tries to figure out what should come next. Billy is no psychiatrist, but he has an idea that might actually be healthy.
Those fucks, Billy thinks, and not for the first time. Assholes who’d rape an unconscious girl. Who does that?
‘Okay, groceries. You’ll stay here, right?’
‘Right.’ As if it’s a foregone conclusion. ‘I’m going to have cereal with the last of the milk. You can have the egg.’ She gives him an uncertain look. ‘If that’s all right. We can do it the other way around if it’s not. They’re your supplies, after all.’
‘That’s fine. Will you help me with my stomach again after breakfast?’
That makes her laugh. It’s the first one.
4
While they eat, he asks if she knows what Stockholm Syndrome is. She doesn’t, so he explains. ‘If I get spotted by the police and picked up, they’ll come here. Tell them you were afraid to leave.’
‘I am,’ Alice says, ‘but not because I’m afraid of you. I don’t want people to see me like this. I don’t want people to see me at all, at least for awhile. Besides, you won’t get picked up. With that stuff on you look a lot different.’ She raises an admonitory finger. ‘But.’
‘But what?’
‘You need an umbrella, because a wig always looks like a wig in the rain. Water beads up on it. Real hair just gets wet and kind of tamps down.’
‘I don’t have an umbrella.’
‘There’s one in the Jensens’ closet. By the door as you go in.’
‘When did you look in their closet?’
‘While you were making the popcorn. Women like to see what other people have.’ She looks at him across the kitchen table, her with her Cheerios, him with his egg. ‘Did you really not know that?’
5
The umbrella does more than keep the rain off his blond wig; it shields his face and makes him feel a little bit less like a bug on a microscope slide as he leaves the house and starts walking toward the nearest bus stop. He can completely relate to how Alice feels, because he feels the same. Going to the drugstore was nerve-racking, but this is worse because he’s going farther. He could walk to Pine Plaza, it’s fairly close and the rain has slacked off again, but he can’t walk all the way across town. And something else – the closer he gets to leaving this city, the more he dreads being captured before he can do it.
Never mind the cops and Nick’s men, what if he meets someone from his David Lockridge life? He imagines rounding a corner in Harps with his little shopping basket over his arm and coming face to face with Paul Ragland or Pete Fazio. They might not recognize him, but a woman would. Never mind what Alice said about him looking different with his wig and fake belly, Phil would. Corinne Ackerman would. Even tipsy Jane Kellogg would, even if she was drunk. He’s sure of it. He understands such a meeting is statistically unlikely, but such things happen all the time. Journeys end in lovers meeting, every wise man’s son doth know.
He examined the online bus schedule before leaving, and waits for the Number 3 at Rampart Street, standing under the bus shelter with three others, collapsing the umbrella because leaving it open would look weird. None of the others look at him. They are all looking at their phones.
He has a bad moment in the parking garage when the Fusion won’t start, then remembers he has to have his foot on the brake pedal. Duh, he thinks.
He drives to Pine Plaza, both enjoying the feeling of being behind the wheel again and paranoid about getting in a fender-bender or attracting the attention of the police （two cruisers pass him on the three-mile trip） in some other way. At Harps he buys meat, milk, eggs, bread, crackers, bag salad, dressing, and some canned goods. He doesn’t meet anyone he knows, and really, why would he? Evergreen Street is in Midwood, and people who live in Midwood shop at Save Mart.
He pays for his groceries with his Dalton Smith Mastercard and drives back to Pearson Street. He parks in the crumbling driveway beside the house and goes downstairs with his groceries. The apartment is empty. Alice is gone.