in an ever-widening circle with her car at the center, parked at a meter on Shattuck, wondering where she went. What happened to her.
Eva scanned the faces of the people around her, silently discarding a man sleeping in a corner and a couple huddled over an iPad, deep in conversation. But there was a woman directly across from her that Eva caught glancing at her as the train hurled south, toward Oakland. She had a magazine open, but as Eva studied the ads above the woman’s head, waiting for her to turn the page of her magazine, the woman remained motionless.
At the next stop, Eva waited until the last second to slip off the train, and watched the woman, still reading, slide past her and into the dark tunnel. She huddled in a corner of the station, her bag slung over her shoulder, watching commuters board and exit trains before picking another one, this time heading toward San Francisco. For the next hour, she transferred and backtracked until she was certain she was alone.
At the airport, she paid cash for a red-eye ticket to Newark.
“One-way or round-trip?” the ticket agent asked.
Eva hesitated. Had Castro put her on some kind of list? Again his words—midlevel target—flashed in her mind. “One-way,” she answered. The finality of it sent a shudder through her. If she was wrong, a one-way ticket would sound the alarm.
* * *
She didn’t relax until well after takeoff. As the passengers around her slept or read, Eva stared out the window, thinking of an evening just after Halloween, when she’d found Liz sitting on the back steps, looking out at their yard in the deepening twilight. “What are you doing back here?” she’d asked.
Liz had looked up from where she sat and smiled. “I love the smell of the evening, when the sun has disappeared and everything starts to cool down. No matter how much life changes, this never does.” She closed her eyes. “My ex-husband and I used to do this, when we were first married. Sit outside and watch the sky change from day to night.”
Eva sat on her own step, looking at Liz through the iron bars of the railing. “Where is he now?”
Liz shrugged and brushed her fingers along the edge of the concrete step. “Last I heard, he moved to Nashville. But that was twenty years ago. I have no idea if he’s still there.”
Eva wondered how she could be so calm about the man who’d abandoned her with a young child and never looked back. “Does Ellie ever hear from him?”
“I don’t know—we don’t really talk about him. But I don’t think so. He sent cards for her birthday for a few years, but those stopped when she was still young.” Liz looked across the yard, to the back fence and the trees beyond. In a quiet voice, she said, “For a while, Ellie blamed me for that. As if I could make that man care about her. But now that she’s grown, she can see him for who he really is, and understand her childhood was probably better without him in it.”
Eva marveled at her calm tone. “How can you not hate him?”
Liz gave a soft chuckle. “Hate can eat you up inside. I could devote hours a day to despising him. But it wouldn’t matter. He’s out there, somewhere, living his life, and if he thinks about us at all, it’s probably only in passing. I decided a long time ago to forgive him, which is a lot easier than hating him.”
Eva thought about the strength that must have taken, to raise her daughter on her own while still following her own dreams. To set the betrayal aside and choose to be happy.
“Have you always been this way? Able to see beyond the worst in people?”
Liz laughed. “It takes a long time to learn how to see the world as a place where people aren’t doing things to you. My husband didn’t set out to break my heart, or Ellie’s. He was just acting on his own desires, living his own story. I hope I’ve become someone who doesn’t get angry when others are just trying to get by. I hope I can be the kind of person who looks toward forgiveness first.”
Eva stared across the yard toward the bushes by the back gate, their shadows quickly disappearing in the fading light. “I’m not very good at forgiveness.”
Liz nodded. “Not many people are. But what I’ve learned in life is that