Before He Finds Her Read Online Free

house, hidden on a deserted road, itself hidden in a small town in a remote part of West Virginia. The same at every scale, her hiding, and so total it felt like a mathematical certainty.
    “I’m sorry,” she said to the instructor. She was calling attention to herself in the worst way—a way that wouldn’t soon be forgotten. The weird, quiet girl was finally saying something. A few students chuckled nervously. “I just...” She looked around at the twenty or so other students and thought about this baby growing inside of her, how this smaller scale of herself would end up deeply hidden, too, layer under layer under layer.
    This she couldn’t allow.
    “I have to...” She made fists of her clammy hands. She wouldn’t have been able to finish her sentence even if she’d had the words. She stood and rushed out of the room, down the hallway, and into the bathroom, where she vomited into a toilet. She knelt on the floor until the queasiness subsided, went over to the sink, and splashed cold water on her face. She stood over the sink, rubbing her belly and taking controlled breaths, until she felt steady enough to drive back to Fredonia and wait for Phillip.
    She sat on the concrete front steps of his rental house, feeling the breeze on her face and laundering time.
    For the last couple of years, she had been reading old Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries in bed at night. She knew the books were for children, but she found them comforting to read at bedtime. The sleuths were always being bound and gagged, but they came out of every situation unharmed, and the criminal was always apprehended.
    In one of the Hardy Boys books, a pawnshop accepted stolen money and then over-reported its sales. Money laundering, they called it. This is what I do, Melanie had immediately thought—only with time instead of money. The two hours of homework she told her aunt and uncle she was doing in her bedroom rarely took more than an hour. With the other hour, she paged through whichever copy of People happened to be stowed under her mattress. More recently, her job at the office supply store in town never demanded those extra hours that Wayne and Kendra believed she was putting in.
    A trip to or from the college was the easiest way of all to launder time. From the start, she’d lied about her class schedule in order to give herself a full hour on either side of the day, two hours that belonged solely to her.
    She didn’t like deceiving her aunt and uncle, but they’d think it was a huge risk for her simply to be sitting here on this quiet street where no one ever walked (too hilly, no sidewalks) and where drivers, the few that passed by, had better things to do than take notice of her.
    She wasn’t the sort of person people noticed, anyway. A girl in Melanie’s freshman composition class, Raquel something, was tall and blonde with huge blue eyes, and looked like she belonged on the red carpet. She carried herself with remarkably casual poise. I’m happy to , she’d say to their instructor whenever he asked her to pass out an assignment. How was your weekend? she’d ask whoever was sitting next to her. She chatted with people as if their presence made her day special.
    Melanie didn’t look like Raquel, and she didn’t know how to act like Raquel.
    And yet here Melanie was, and not Raquel.
    It was 3:15. She didn’t mind waiting, watching the cars pass. Her own home sat at the end of a long driveway on an unpaved road that cut through the woods. For a number of years, long before Melanie ever lived there, the road was nameless. Over time, a large, hand-painted N O T RESPASSING sign that somebody had stuck into the ground where the road began suffered enough weather damage that those final three letters became too faded to read. First the neighbors, then others in town, and finally the U.S. Postal Service began referring to their road as Notress Pass.
    Other than that sign and the story behind it, nothing was remotely notable about