She mumbled a lie about how she didn’t want to leave me, knowing how much danger she’d put me in. I sighed, stepped into the hall, retrieved her suitcase and escorted her into my flat. She hung her coat on the coat rack, removed her shoes and saw herself into the kitchenette.

“Where’s your coffee?”

“Cabinet above the hotplate.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. She’d stopped the bus, hopped a cab to wherever she was living, changed, packed a suitcase and called a cab, probably the same one I had just seen driving away. She had done something else as well. Someone had called me on behalf of her ex-husband only a couple of hours after the bus had pulled away. She’d contacted him.

I returned to the window and watched the black car down on the street. A man in black approached the car from the direction of my building’s entrance. He got into the passenger seat.

Two men were watching my building and they must have seen Maryanne arrive. Her presence made our… my situation far worse.