Ethan
The Rosewood Motel wasn’t the kind of place I ever imagined ending up, but it had two things going for it. It was cheap, and nobody there cared who I used to be. The woman at the front desk called me Mr. Cole and nothing else, no follow-up questions about the papers or the wedding photos that had, according to a coworker who’d tracked me down against my wishes, been circulating for weeks. I paid in cash. I kept my head down. It was as close to disappearing as a person could get in a city that size.
I’d stopped answering calls from anyone I used to know. My old coworker Marcus tried twice, leaving voicemails I deleted without listening past the first ten seconds. A cousin of Clara’s, of all people, reached out through a mutual friend, claiming she wanted to talk to me on Clara’s beh
