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I didn’t understand that at the time. I thought it had stopped because I had gotten better at not causing it. That it had stopped because there was a man in my life that the man in my bed was frightened of. But the day we put my father in the ground was the day that stopped being true. And it took seven weeks after the funeral for me to find that out with my back against a bathroom door and blood coating my skin.

But unbeknownst to me at the time, my lifeline came only two weeks after I buried my father. A man I had known my whole life as Uncle Duke sat me down at my father’s kitchen table with a shoebox in front of him and said the sentence I have lived inside ever since.

“Your dad kept me out of a hole in the ground three times, sweetheart. I’ve got nobody to pay that back to but you.”

He put a driver’s license on the table and a social security card. Then he added a birth certificate, a nursing registration transfer and a bank account, all of them carrying a last name that wasn’t mine. My first name he kept, because he knew what it meant to my dad, as well as me. Because it was my mother’s middle name, Mariana. So, they named me Anna after her.

But the second I looked down at it, everything in me lied as I told him I didn’t need it. I remember being almost offended, because I was twenty-three years old and I had just buried my father. That I was not the sort of woman who took a shoebox from an old man and understood what it meant. I also didn’t know in that moment just how wrong I would be.

He didn’t argue with me. He just slid it across the table and said we would call it a gift, and that gifts were not the sort of thing a person paid for. That I should hide it somewhere I could reach for it in a hurry.

Because he had watched the man I was with for a year and a half and he had seen exactly what I had been so careful not to tell anybody. But he had known what was going to happen the moment my father was not standing behind me.

That first one, I never paid a cent for.

Every single one since I have. Until this one, anyway. And not because he ever asked, but because I wouldn’t let him do it for free. Because I wasn’t naive. I knew what something like that cost. I had even heard him and my father talking about it once and Duke; he was one of the best, and you pay even more for the best.

So even though there was no way I would have ever been able to afford the true cost of a new identity, I also wanted him to have something for his time. So, in total, I had paid Duke four thousand two hundred dollars across three years, in cash, in installments, and two thousand of that was Anna Vale alone. Something he only took because I told him I would not accept another one otherwise.

A master and artist in his field, he is also careful in a way that is old school and rare these days. Because he doesn’t keep records, he doesn’t work for anybody who scares him, and in three years he has asked me exactly one question.

Which state.

Never the town, never the job, never why, never what happened. Just the state, because he can’t build the license without it, and then a place to send it to and nothing else at all.

He is also seventy-one years old with a bad hip, and every time I call him, I hear him worry about how many of these he has left in him. Then every time I say it’s that time again, I hate myself for it and feel bad for weeks after.

But he has never once said no.

“Nobody’s ever going to do to you what they did to your mother, sweetheart. Not while I’m still breathing. Your dad and me had an agreement.”

I have never asked him what he meant by that.

And honestly,

I have never wanted to know.

Now, as for my new name, Duke knew the second I called that this was not a planned move like the last one. Like Anna Vale had been. The one that had taken sixteen weeks and cost me two thousand dollars. Because most of the time, moving on was a choice, not someone chasing me out of my apartment or private detectives snooping around. Although both of those two things had happened in the early days before I got good at this.

However, that was not the case with Erin Shaw.

No, Erin Shaw only took him nine days and didn’t cost me a penny because this time, he refused to accept it. Because he knew that for the first time in two years, I was running scared.

Which was why there was a padded envelope waiting under a false name at a mail drop three hundred miles from where I had called him. Then I did the thing I always do, which was to take whatever job would have me. Because that was the thing about running. You don’t get to choose. You take the placement nobody else wants, in the town nobody moves to, because those are the ones that don’t ask you anything and say you can start next week.

I had worked a night shift in a nursing home where three of the residents had been there longer than the building’s fire certificate. I had worked a rural clinic that paid late and apologized about it. I had done so many different jobs now that pretty soon they would all start to merge into one.

So, when the agency called, it was to offer me six weeks of leave cover at a place called Corwin. It was a locked admissions unit, twenty-eight beds, forensic psychiatric, and maximum security. They needed somebody in four days because the nurse I would be covering had walked out with no notice and nobody local would go near it.

I didn’t even laugh.

I just said yes.

Six weeks in a locked hospital for the criminally insane.

Fantastic. Wonderful. You burned a name and crossed three states to get away from a man in a cage, Erin, and you have gone and got yourself a job in a bigger one.

And let’s just say, the irony wasn’t lost on me.