For three months I practiced the drive to the women’s shelter over in Muncie at two in the morning. I would get up while Harlan was dead to the world, slip out to the Buick, and drive the twelve miles with my headlights off until I hit the county road. I wanted my hands and feet to already know the way without me having to think about it once. Harlan is seventy-one years old and has never once hit me in our forty-two years of marriage.

He does it with the doors instead. That week he had gone down to the hardware store and bought a heavy brass deadbolt, the kind you need a key for from both sides, and he had screwed it into the back door himself while whistling a hymn. Then he turned around and smiled at me, really smiled, and said, “Now I always know where you are.”

I am sixty-eight. I want you to understand I am not some foolish young girl who didn’t see the signs coming. I taught Sunday school at First Baptist for thirty years, and I know human nature down to its roots. I have been quietly planning my own escape like a soldier, because that is what it took to stay alive in my own skin.

It started slow, the way a weed takes over a garden when you are looking the other way. First it was the checkbook disappearing from the kitchen desk.

Then my car keys started ending up on a high peg by the back door only he could reach without a stool. Then he would take my phone to keep it charged on his side of the bed and hand it back hours later with the call log completely cleared.

I stopped being surprised a long time ago. Surprise is a luxury for people who still believe things might get better on their own.

What I did instead was get careful. I started skimming twenty dollars here, ten dollars there from my grocery cash, hiding the folded bills inside an old maxi-pad box shoved in the very back of the hall closet. It is the one place a man like Harlan will never look because it makes him uncomfortable just to walk past it. By the time he put that deadbolt on, I had three hundred and twelve dollars tucked in there, saved over four months of buying store-brand flour and cutting coupons.

I had a second stash, too. I put a spare key to the Buick and a clean set of wool slacks and a sweater in a canvas grocery tote and hid it in the coat closet at church, right behind the heavy velvet choir robes. Pastor Dale never checks behind those robes, and even if he did, nobody would look twice at an old bag left by a volunteer.

Every few nights, when Harlan’s sleep apnea machine kicked on with its rhythmic, mechanical hiss and I knew he was under for the count, I would slip out. I would sit in the cold front seat of the Buick and just drive the route in my head. Left on Vine Street. Past the shuttered Kmart with the broken glass in the parking lot. The Marathon station with the flickering red sign on the corner. Then the turn most people miss because the sign was taken down back in the nineties.

I did it so many times I could do it with my eyes closed. That was the whole point of it. When you are that scared, your mind just goes totally white like a blown fuse. But your feet and your hands remember what they have practiced.

Here is the small detail I never told a soul, not even the intake worker at the shelter. Weeks ago, before he even bought the lock, I had gone around the house with a screwdriver and quietly loosened the screws on the laundry-room window, the one that opens onto the dark side yard by the hydrangea bushes. Just backed them out a half-turn each, day by day, so the latch would still catch on the surface but lift right out if you gave it a little shove.

Because I knew the door thing was coming. I knew it the way you know a heavy frost is coming when the leaves turn that pale, dull silver in October.

And Tuesday night, right on schedule, it came. He put the new lock on right before supper time, and he tested it in front of me twice. Click, click. Just like that. Then he gave me that line about always knowing where I was. He went up to bed at nine sharp like he always does.

I lay there right next to him in the dark until his machine started its low, steady hiss. The red numbers on the clock glowed 1:48. I had memorized the numbers on that digital face for so long they did not even look like time anymore. They just looked like a sentence I was serving.

I got up in my stocking feet. I did not take a bag because the bag was already waiting for me behind the choir robes. I walked down the dark hallway without making a single floorboard groan, slipped into the laundry room, and lifted that heavy window. The cool night air hit my face like cold water. I crawled out into the dark in my cotton nightgown and my late mother’s heavy wool winter coat.

The Buick started on the very first try. God bless that car.

I made every single turn without having to think, exactly like I had practiced in my head a hundred times over. I was three blocks from the shelter, my hands finally starting to shake now that the hard part was behind me and the warmth of the building was almost in sight, when I saw a pair of low headlights come up slow behind me and stay right on my bumper.

Then those exact same headlights followed me right into the gravel shelter lot and killed their engine. A car door creaked open in the dark. Footsteps crunched loud on the loose gravel. And someone knocked twice on my driver-side window.

I sat there with my hands frozen on the steering wheel, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird, ready to throw the car back into reverse and run for the highway. But then the overhead security light flickered on above the shelter door, and I saw who was standing outside my glass. It wasn’t Harlan. It was Sarah, the night intake coordinator I had called from a payphone behind the gas station three weeks ago to set up the whole thing, holding a steaming paper cup of coffee and looking at me with her old blue eyes wide and steady.

She didn’t say a word. She just reached out and tapped the glass again, motioning for me to pop the latch.

I turned the key off, and the silence in the car was heavier than anything I had ever felt in my life. I pushed the door open, let the cold night air rush in, and stepped out onto the gravel.