…ten,” he said. And then the doorbell rang. He froze. It rang again. A woman’s voice called through the door, loud and steady: “Police. And Hannah. Open the door, Mark.” His hand slid off my shoulder. I watched him understand, very slowly, that I had not come home early by accident.
Three weeks earlier, a woman named Hannah had messaged me on Instagram. She was the third name on that list. 2021. “I don’t want to scare you,” she wrote. “But does he count?” I didn’t answer for two days. Then I wrote back: “Yes.” She sent me photos of the same whiteboard, the same handwriting, the same tally marks. Hers stopped at nine, too. That’s the day she ran.
Hannah had found the other two women. All three were alive. All three had “moved,” exactly as the board said, but not the way he meant it. They had packed in the middle of the night, left their furniture, changed their numbers, and moved to other states. Each one had believed she was the only one.
We made a plan together. I stopped being late on purpose. I reached nine on Friday. I told him I’d be home at six and came at four. Hannah sat in an unmarked car down the block with an officer she’d been talking to for weeks. I wore a recording app the whole time. When he said “that makes number…”, the officer heard every word.
They didn’t arrest him that night; there wasn’t enough yet. But they walked me out of that apartment with two suitcases, and I never went back. With my recording and the testimony of three other women, I got a protective order the next week. So did they. His name is in a database now, and the next woman who searches it will find all four of ours.
Hannah and I meet for coffee every month. Sometimes the others join us on video. We call ourselves “the women who moved.” We joke about it now. But I keep a photo of that whiteboard on my phone, wiped clean, so I never forget what it looked like right before I left.
