Sitting in her car, Evvie Drake tries to summon the courage to leave her husband, Dr. Tim Drake. Having wrestled with this for a long time, she finally decides the time is now. She puts an envelope full of cash in her car, not knowing whether Tim might shut down her credit cards and close their accounts. She has only planned out the first day of being gone, which will entail lying on the bed in the hotel room, reading a book, and drinking a bottle of wine.

Her phone rings. A nurse from the hospital where Tim works says that he is terribly injured as the result of an auto accident. Evvie calls her friend Andy and asks him to contact her father with the news. Holmes writes, “She later figured, from her phone and all the paperwork, that he probably died while she was waiting at the stoplight at Chisholm Street, a block from the church where they got married” (5).

Because she has bad dreams upstairs in the bed that she shared with Tim, Evvie sleeps in the little blue apartment that is her favorite part of the large house Tim bought for them.