She didn't sleep, not really. She dozed in stretches, the way she'd learned to in her cell, where real sleep meant giving up too much control.
The lot she picked was behind a shuttered auto parts store, tucked between a dumpster and a chain-link fence, the kind of spot that wouldn't draw a cop's flashlight unless someone complained. She'd found it on her second night out, after the first night taught her that gas station lots got swept by security around 2 a.m. and shelter beds filled up faster than she'd expected.
She reclined the driver's seat as far as it would go and pulled her jacket up to her chin. The seatbelt buckle dug into her hip no matter how she turned. She'd stopped noticing that after the third night.
Around four, a truck rumbled past on the main road and she came awake fast, hand already braced against the door before her brain caught up to where she was. Not a cell. Not a guard doing rounds. Just a truck.
She lay there a while after that, staring at the shape of the dumpster through the windshield, and thought about the text again.
*A friend of the family recommended you by name.*
She didn't have a family. Her mother had left when Ivy was nine, her father had drunk himself into a hospital bed when she was fifteen, and after that it had been whoever's couch would have her until the couches ran out. She'd built something like a family once, briefly, with a woman two doors down in the apartment complex where Ivy used to live… a woman named Renee, who made too much rice and always sent some over, who used to sit on her porch steps some evenings and talk about nothing in particular.
Renee's husband was the man Ivy had killed.
She hadn't spoken to Renee since the sentencing. Renee hadn't come to visit, hadn't written, hadn't done anything but disappear the way people do when what you did for them costs more than they can carry.
So if it wasn't Renee, and it wasn't family, because she had none, then who used her name like it meant something?
She didn't have an answer by sunrise, and she was too tired to keep chasing one. She sat up, rubbed the crick out of her neck, and caught her reflection in the rearview mirror. Not good. Not good at all for someone about to be looked over for a job.
The gym down the street had a day pass for six dollars, the kind of place that didn't ask why a woman showed up at 6 a.m. with a duffel bag and left forty minutes later smelling like soap instead of sweat. She'd found it her first week out and it had become the whole architecture of her mornings… shower, change, brush her teeth over a sink with a cracked mirror, try to look like a person who had somewhere better to sleep than a parking lot.
She'd bought the outfit at a thrift store three days ago with money she couldn't really spare: black slacks, a plain button-down, flats that pinched a little at the heel. Something you can move in, the text had said. She hoped that meant she'd guessed right.
In the gym bathroom, she pulled her hair back tight and looked at herself for longer than she meant to. Twenty-seven years old and she looked older around the eyes, the kind of tiredness that didn't come from one bad night. The scar along her collarbone peeked out from her collar and she buttoned one more button to cover it, out of habit more than shame.
*You did what you had to do,* she told the mirror, the way she'd told herself a hundred times in a cell that echoed. The mirror didn't say anything back.
She had two hours before the interview, and nowhere to be, and that was its own kind of exhausting… freedom with nothing to fill it. She drove instead of sitting still. Just drove, past the block where her old apartment used to be, now a parking structure. Past the diner where she'd worked the night shift before everything happened, boarded up now, a For Lease sign peeling at one corner.
She parked outside it for a minute, engine idling, and thought about how much smaller the world got when you had nowhere in it that wanted you back.
Her phone buzzed. Not a text this time… a call, from the same number.
She let it ring twice before she answered. "Hello?"
"Ivy Calloway?" A woman's voice, warm, a little clipped, like someone used to talking fast between other things. "This is Marisol, from Bright Homes. Just confirming you're still good for nine."
"I'm good for nine."
"Wonderful. One small change… the interview's not at our office. Our client would prefer to meet at the residence directly. I'll text you the address."
Ivy's grip on the phone tightened. "That's unusual, isn't it? Meeting at the house before I've even been hired?"
A pause, brief, the kind that told her the question hadn't been expected. "Some of our clients prefer it. Gives you both a feel for the position." Marisol's voice smoothed back out, professional again. "It's a good opportunity, Ms. Calloway. Live-in, full room and board, competitive pay. Given your… circumstances… that's not nothing."
*Given your circumstances.* Ivy had heard that phrase enough times to know exactly what it meant, and exactly how fast it could turn into a door shutting in her face.
"I'll be there," she said again, because she didn't have the luxury of asking more questions than she could afford to scare off an answer to.
"Perfect. I'll send the pin now."
The call ended. A minute later, the address came through… a street name Ivy didn't recognize, out past the edge of the city where the houses started getting bigger and the lots started getting quieter.
She typed the address into her phone's cracked-screen map and watched the little blue line draw itself across town, further and further from anything she knew, until it stopped at a shape she almost didn't believe… an aerial view of a house so large it looked less like a home and more like something built to keep people out.
Or in.
She sat there staring at it, thumb hovering over the screen, and felt that same crawling feeling from the night before settle back into place at the base of her skull.
*A friend of the family recommended you by name.*
She still didn't know who that friend was.
But as she pulled out of the diner lot and pointed the car toward the address, she had the distinct, unshakable sense that she was about to find out… and that whoever it was, they'd been waiting for her a lot longer than two weeks.