I STOP, but I don’t turn around. She is certainly no one I recognize. I don’t think she’s come to kill me; she’s not the type (though maybe that makes her perfect for the job), and here on the street in the middle of the day seems an unnecessarily reckless place for it to happen.

Still, I wait and brace myself.

“All right!” she says happily, triumphantly, like a kid. “Score! I can’t believe it’s finally you. You can turn around, it’s okay.”

I turn around, and she takes a picture of me with her phone.

“Who are you?” I say. “You’re not a cop?”

“Hold on a sec . . . wait . . . and send,” she says. “Sorry? No, I’m not a cop. Do I look like a cop?” She looks like a pixie. She is so small I feel that even I could take her in any sort of physical battle, and I wonder how she has accounted for that. She is still six or eight feet away from me. “I’m a private investigator,” she says.

“What’s your name?”

“Not really important, right?”

“Who hired you?”

“Well, you can probably figure that one out. Your business partner, with a big assist from your wife.” Her phone pings; she suspends everything to check it, as they all do, and she barks out a laugh. “Speak of the devil,” she says.

“How did you find me?”

She beams. “I was hoping you’d ask me that!” she says. “It was awesome. Nothing, nada, for like four or five months, and then your car randomly turned up in a bust in the middle of nowhere. By the time I got there, the cops had gotten the guy to flip on the salvage yard where he bought it, and they let me talk to that guy and he described the whole encounter with you. And that was just the beginning! All I had at that point was you on a county road headed east. The key to it, really, was trying to think like you, trying to figure what move a guy like you would make next, smart guy without a lot of survival skills. I thought, okay, it has to be a city . . .”

“Fine, okay, that’s enough,” I say. “I don’t know why you’re telling me all this. I don’t know why you’ve outed yourself to me at all. Now that I know I’m found I’ll just get lost again. Unless your plan is to bring me back somehow, which—”

“No, man, a bounty hunter I am not. My job was to find you, and you’re found. They’ve got your location, a current photo. There are warrants out for your arrest, so things’ll start to happen now, things that have nothing to do with me. Hey, did you know that you could be divorced in absentia? In some states anyway. I never knew that before. Anyway, congratulations, you’re a single guy now.” She looks at her phone again. “She’s texting me like crazy,” she says.

I am burning to go inside—I am making a list of next moves in my head—but it occurs to me that, though Pixie P.I. knows my address, she may not know I’m living downstairs now, and I don’t want to give it away. Maybe she is trying to make me do exactly that? But no. “Go ahead,” she says, and it is humiliating to be read so easily by such a person. “It’s okay. I know the living situation. Autumn still claims this all happened by accident, that you just randomly showed up at her door, but I don’t know if that’s credible. What, did you meet her online or something? Run away to be together? Usually when guys like you pull that, the woman on the other end is like nineteen. So, you know, kudos I guess?”

“You talked to her?” I say. “To Autumn?”

“Yeah, just like an hour or two ago. Met her for coffee, told her everything. Corrected her impressions. If I were you I would buy her some flowers or something, dude.”

I turn my back to her again and try not to run toward the house. I’m struck by the fact that she hasn’t asked me about the money. Opening the door, I look over my shoulder; once again I am looking at the back of her head, as she takes a selfie with the house and myself in the background.

Time is no longer money; time is time. When I’m sure the detective is gone, I exit Autumn’s and go up the side stairs to my room. The windows haven’t been opened in a while. There is nothing there I want to take, and nothing, in any case, to put it in, since the various gym bags and boxes in which I traveled across the country were all thrown away a year ago. Hardly anything in the place but its surfaces, and those surfaces are now all evidence. Traces of me must be everywhere. It couldn’t be otherwise. I am hit forcefully by what seems like a great and necessary idea, which is to set fire to the house. Autumn has matches downstairs someplace. But you don’t burn down a house with a book of matches. The futon doesn’t even look flammable; they probably make them nowadays with that in mind. I don’t have time to figure it out. I head back down the stairs, leaving the door open behind me, and halfway down I think of something: Maybe it was the detective who broke into my room. Maybe the reason she didn’t ask about the money is that she already has the money. Maybe it’s purely about revenge now, about punishment, judgment. Well, I will not be judged.

Under Autumn’s sink I find some kind of tote bag. I go into the bedroom and jam as many items of my clothing inside it as I can. Then I go back to the kitchen and grab half a dozen of those power bars she eats and stuff those in there too. What I need most is money, but I’ve looked everywhere for it. I look again anyway. I slide the mattress off the frame, I pull down whatever crap is on the shelf in her closet, and when I hear footsteps, Autumn’s footsteps, in the driveway, I run to the kitchen, open the junk drawer, grab the gun, and lay it gently in the tote bag with a shirt folded over it.