Keep This Quiet: Front seat of the green car

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Sunday. The lane, five past eleven.

Her hand came off the bar.

It felt like a hand that had spent a year and a half reaching for something, finally closing on it.

She went through the gap in the iron. The passenger seat smelled of hospital soap under the violets, two women's ghosts in one small car. Sloane shut the door on her with the care of somebody who had shut it before.

The lane took them with the lights off. Hornbeams went past as darker shapes in the dark. Behind them, up the lawn, nothing changed in the black glass of the house. She watched it not change until the wall took it.

At the county road Sloane put the lights on. The permit on the dash lit up, an old hospital lot, a nurse's name.

"Two hours," Sloane said. "Then a room with a lamp in it, and a man at a paper who's had my letters for a year with no face to put on them. Tomorrow he gets a face."

The ring went from her third finger to her second on the wheel.

"You're not asking about the keys."

"I'm asking."

"They hung on a hook by a door I've had a key to for two years. Nobody hides anything in that house. You know its method by now."