The night of September 14, 1964, I lay on my bunk fully dressed under the blanket, listening for the particular quiet that meant the corridor watch had moved on, the quiet Evelyn had taught us to recognize by counting.
When it came, I got up and went to the opening I had expected to leave through. I had tested it before and believed it would let me pass. That belief was the last easy thing I had that night.
It would not shift that night. I don't know if the swelling damp of an early fall rain had tightened the wood, or if something behind it had settled wrong, but where it had given two days before under my hands, that night it held fast no matter how I worked it.
I pressed my shoulder to it. I braced my feet and pulled until my fingers split at the nail bed. I was not gentle and I was not careful, because careful had stopped mattering the moment I understood I might not get through in time.
Past the wall I heard it, faint enough that I had to hold my own breathing still to catch it. Footsteps, three sets, unhurried at first, then quicker, moving along the yard side toward the drainage cut we'd scouted together in August.
I wanted to call out. I had my mouth open to do it, some fool instinct to shout wait, before my better sense closed it again, because a shout would have brought the watch down on all four of us instead of three.
So I only listened, my face pressed near the gap I could not widen, until the footsteps thinned into nothing and the night gave back only the ordinary sounds of wind working the eaves.
I do not know what became of them beyond that wall. I never saw open water that night. I never saw which direction they turned once they cleared the yard. I have spent seventeen years being honest about that single fact because it is the only fact I actually have.
I sat on the floor of my cell with my back against the panel that had failed me, and I did not feel noble, and I did not feel like a woman who had chosen anything. I felt like a woman who had reached for a door and found it locked from a direction no one could open.
I waited for someone to come back for me, though I knew even as I waited how foolish that hope was. Evelyn had said it plain at the table in July. There's no in-between. I had agreed to those terms myself, and now I was living inside them.
Near dawn I worked the panel loose at last, the wood finally giving the way it should have hours before, and for one terrible moment I thought I could still go, could still follow whatever path they'd taken and call it only delayed instead of failed.
But the yard outside was already graying toward morning, and I could hear, faint and far off, the particular rhythm of boots that meant the early watch was already stirring, and I understood that my window, whatever size it had ever truly been, had closed sometime in the dark while I was fighting a door that wasn't ready to let me through.
I pushed the panel back into its frame as best I could, smoothed my blanket, and lay down with my split fingers tucked under my arms, shaking, not from cold.
I was not ashamed yet of what people would later say about me. That particular shame came slower, built itself up over months and then years, brick by brick, the same way my respectable later life would be built. That first morning I only felt the plain, ordinary fury of a woman who had done everything asked of her and still ended up exactly where she started, alone in a cell on Cinder Island. Three women I had trusted with my whole next life were gone from the places where I knew how to find them. Beyond that, I knew nothing.