It is time to go. She has lingered long enough. She has hidden long enough. It is as she suspected. She has been found. They will use her again. They that sent her had never lost track of her. Though she changed her name, her face, her voice. She’d let herself be consumed by the free world until she was just another face in the masses of New York. The flight to America was just a dream. In her soul, deep down she knew she would never escape.

She thinks back to when she first met Joe. On Greenwich Street just down from Battery Park. Secure in her mask. She didn’t know it would mean something. But it had.

The warning came finally on a cold day in February. The barely melted snow casting the street in a grim glow of bruised purples and blues. Lucy’s dark eyes search the sidewalk below again. A few minutes ago a dark shadow had been standing just there. Just out of reach of the luminous glitter of the street light. A black shape with black empty eyes upturned to the window in which Lucy crouches clutching the rose-colored drapes.  On the floor at her stockinged feet is a small creased parchment. Instructions. Where to go, when, what to do. Hand delivered to her husband Joe just before dinner from their dear neighbor old Mrs. McGillicutty. Who all along had been watching and waiting. Like a badger with bared teeth and empty eyes. 

Next Chapter: Joe, March 1938, New York