I crossed the next street, the streetlights flashing yellow in the gloom. A neon sign hanging in a window cast harsh shadows over the sidewalk.

MERV’S BAR & GRILL, the sign read. I peeked in the windows as I passed. The restaurant was separated into two rooms. One side held the bar and booths. The other side had some booths, tables, and a pool-table area. Maybe I’d go there first. Less likely to get into trouble in a family restaurant. Anna would be proud.

I kept walking until the shops thinned out and residential houses picked up. Nothing looked run-down here. The lawns were cut. The hedges were trimmed. The windows and shutters of the houses were clean and freshly painted.

It was exactly the kind of place where I felt like I didn’t fit in.

A lot of my life before the Branch was still a muddy mess, but I acutely remembered the house my dad and I had lived in. Run-down piece of shit in the middle of a bunch of pine trees. Our driveway was dust and dirt, with patches of grass on the perimeter. Nothing that ever needed to be mowed. And even if it had, my dad wouldn’t have bothered.

We’d moved there after my mom left us because my dad didn’t like living in the middle of town. Probably because his neighbors hated him.

At the end of Washington Street, I found a park. A fountain stood in the center. A huge playground took up the back corner. A fenced dog park spanned the opposite corner. A garden took up the front, with benches stuck in between the flower beds.

I picked a bench in the back of the garden, hidden in the shadows cast by an oak tree, and sat. I looked out on Trademarr and took a deep breath, the cool air filling my lungs.

I thought of the girl and wondered if she lived in one of those perfect houses with the cut lawns and red shutters and trimmed hedges.

Or maybe she was dead already, her house six feet in the ground. And maybe I’d been the one to put her there.

After a few hours’ sleep in the truck, I went in search of food. I walked straight to the coffee shop I’d passed earlier, since it was big enough to disappear in and small enough that I could keep track of who came and went.

A bell dinged as I entered the place, and a few heads glanced up. My skin crawled at the attention, and I worried my reasons for being here were immediately clear. And then one of Anna’s comments came back to me, reminding me not to panic.

“Women watch you everywhere you go,” she said once when we were shopping together in a bookstore. “You could walk in here in a garbage bag and they’d still look at you.”

At the time I thought it sounded like complete bullshit, but then I had a flashback of me in a club, before the Branch, talking a woman into fucking me in the bathroom before she even knew my name.

It was memories like that that made me want to keep the past buried. I didn’t want to remember who I used to be.

I ordered a coffee and an egg sandwich and took a seat near the front windows. The streets were busy with foot traffic, but not a lot of vehicles. I liked that about this town already. The buildings were mostly one story, another good thing. It meant it was harder for people to hide on the rooftops.

As I ate, I watched the faces of the people passing by, looking for the one face that mattered. The girl would probably be eighteen or nineteen now. I remembered her eyes the most. Big green eyes. As round as quarters. And freckles on the bridge of her nose.

There hadn’t been any mention of her in my file, only of someone or something called Target E. The case file itself was labeled TURROW and talked about a doctor developing some kind of serum. Anna had said she’d continue digging while I was gone, but I wasn’t holding out hope.

My first stop today was the public library. I wanted to read the newspapers from the month when I was here six years ago.

I took my coffee with me as I checked my phone for the library’s location. Just as the GPS brought it up, a new text came in.

How are you?

There was no name with the text, since I hadn’t programmed it in, but I knew right away who it was. Anna.

Fine, was all I said.

Then, I told you to text me the second you got into town.

I sighed and took a gulp of the now lukewarm coffee. Anna was sometimes impossible to placate. And I wasn’t used to people constantly worrying about me. It made me uneasy. And annoyed.

I arrived, I wrote back. And I’m fine.

Text me later to let me know you’re not dead. Got it?

Yes, fine, I replied, and activated the GPS again. I memorized the directions and quickly put the phone away.

The Trademarr public library was four blocks to the east, so I crossed the street with purpose, head up, shoulders loose. I didn’t want to stick out, even if I looked like a tourist.

When I left Washington Street behind me, the foot traffic disappeared. It made it easier to focus my thoughts, instead of scanning the faces I passed, looking for someone who might register as familiar.

The public library was another one-story building, and it was made of brick the color of old blood. A flyer taped to the front door announced an arts festival in the park the following weekend. More people in town meant more distractions, more ways for the Branch, or Riley, to hide if they were still around and looking for me.

Sam was convinced Riley wouldn’t let the Branch die, and while I didn’t always agree with him and his unchecked paranoia, I had to side with him on this one. Riley was a weaselly son of a bitch, and he’d always been 100 percent dedicated to the Branch. He wouldn’t let it go so easily.

As soon as I stepped through the second set of doors of the library, a short girl with white-blond hair smiled at me from behind the front desk and called out hello. Another thing I’d learned about small towns was how obscenely friendly people were. Like they were trying to make up for the fact that their town sucked ass.