For almost a year I read my neighbor Corina’s living-room curtains the way other people read the weather. Open meant she was safe and I should stay out of it. Closed meant come Tuesday, when her husband Dell worked his double at the distribution center, and we’d add another paper to the cookie tin. That was our whole system. So when I got up this Monday and saw her curtains pulled tight, on the wrong day, my old heart just about stopped, because that had never once meant anything good.

I’m Wanda. I’m 69 and I’ve lived on Delmar Court for 22 years. Corina and Dell moved into the rental beside me in the spring.

I knew inside a month. You learn the sounds of a house when you’ve lived alone next to one long enough. The low voice that goes on too long. The quiet after, which is worse. The way she’d wave at me from the porch with sunglasses on for a bruise she thought I couldn’t see.

I didn’t rush her. My own mother taught me you don’t rush a frightened animal, you just keep still and keep the door open. So one Tuesday, when Dell was on his double at the distribution center, I brought over a coffee cake and I sat at Corina’s table and I said, plain, “Honey, whatever you decide, I’m right next door, and I’m not going anywhere.”

She cried into a dish towel so Dell wouldn’t see it later.

We built it slow. Every Tuesday, his long shift, I’d come with something baked, and she’d bring me one more thing for the tin.

Her real birth certificate, copied. The kids’ shot records. A little cash, folded small, $20 here, $40 there, that she’d skimmed off the grocery money over weeks so it wouldn’t show. I kept a prepaid phone charged for her in my kitchen drawer, next to the good scissors.

And we set the curtains. Open, all’s well, leave it be. Closed, but only ever on a Tuesday, meant come over, we’ve got work to do.

Monday morning the curtains were shut.

The prepaid phone in my drawer hadn’t rung. That was the plan too, that she’d only use it in the worst case, because Dell went through her real phone every night. If the curtains were closed on a wrong day and the phone was silent, it meant she couldn’t get to it.

I stood at my kitchen window in my robe with my coffee going cold in my hand.

I want to tell you I was brave. I was scared to my bones.

I’m an old woman with a bad hip and a cookie tin full of another woman’s whole life. But I got dressed, and I got the tin down, and I got the prepaid phone out of the drawer.

Dell’s truck was still in the driveway. That was the part that made the fear real. His shift didn’t start till three. It wasn’t even nine. He was home, and her curtains were shut, and the signal we’d built for a Tuesday was screaming at me on a Monday morning.

I was reaching for my own phone to call the county sheriff’s non-emergency line, the one I’d written on my hand in ink so I wouldn’t fumble it, when I heard it.

A knock at my back door. Soft. Fast. Three times, then two.

That was hers.

I didn’t think about my hip then. I crossed that linoleum faster than I’d done in five years, my hand shaking so hard I nearly dropped the latch. I pulled the wood door open and there she was on the back step, grey-faced and shivering in a light cardigan, with her little boy Leo tucked behind her leg and baby Maya bundled in a ratty blue blanket against her chest.

Corina didn’t say a word. She just stepped past me into the warmth of my kitchen, her boots tracking wet grass onto my clean floor, and let out a breath she must have been holding since Sunday night.

“He stayed home,” she whispered, her voice cracking right down the middle. “He called in sick. But he’s sleeping. For now.”

I locked the back door and slid the heavy brass bolt home, the one my husband put in back when we first moved onto Delmar Court. I walked over to the counter and set down the heavy old tin with the faded yellow daisies on the lid, the one that had held our little secret life for twelve long months.

“We have an hour before he wakes up,” I said, reaching for the prepaid phone in my apron pocket. “Let’s call the number.”