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match once in a while.”
    “Unlike you, I don’t have a need for matching pantsuits. I’m fine the way I am.” I did wonder what she meant. In making myself less conspicuous, I likely had not taken care of my appearance, but I didn’t want to be targeted in any way for the way I looked. Drab was the color of transparency and anonymity.
    She just looked at me and then turned away. I opened the door for her to leave and locked it afterwards. No use in being unsafe.
    I tried to get the Scotties into our daily rituals, but they were having none of it. Even though they would lose in a three-to-two battle in the current household, I would have laid odds on their determination. Stubborn was the nicest word to describe them.
    So they practically told me what to do. Ruby must have fed them early, because they were trying to herd me into the kitchen by 5:30 in the morning. Bruno will always eat and The Countess gets dry food whenever she wants, so I was okay with feeding them. I decided that rather than trying to put them into my routine, I would see what they normally did. This would give me some insight into Ruby’s routine and maybe give me some other avenues of investigation. At 8pm, they wanted a treat of some sort. I tried three different ones but none of them satisfied the dogs. When I went to bed at eleven, they went to bed with me, sleeping on the opposite, empty side of my queen-sized bed.
    It must have been close to two hours later, when I heard a strange noise. At first, I assumed that it was just the sounds of new dogs in the house, but I turned to face the other direction and saw that both dogs were still sound asleep on the other side of the bed. I saw Bruno in his bed, and The Countess never made noises like this.
    I had two things going for me if this was an intruder. The first was that I kept a bat under the bed. My parents had prepped the two remaining children on preparedness and surviving an attack. The second had been my own way of coping with the loss. I’d become a black belt in tae kwon do. The surprising thing to me about martial arts was that it taught you to avoid conflict rather than seek it out. That was a message I had needed to hear. I’d gone there to kick everyone’s ass and instead came out a philosopher.
    The dogs didn’t seem to mind that I got out of bed with a bat. They both rested contentedly in the bed and barely raised their heads to see me tiptoe to the door. I was glad to see that they were comfortable here, but I wanted some of that territorial instinct now.
    While I had been telling myself that this was all the product of my overly active imagination, what I saw proved me wrong. The beam of a flashlight hit the doorframe and moved on down the hall. I froze. This was exactly the scenario which had been drilled into my head from the day my sister had vanished: the nighttime intruder who snatched you up. Now he was in my house. At least I assumed it was a man given the years of hearing the abductor called a man in my house.
    I tried to breathe slowly, but I couldn’t. I felt like the hero of a Poe story, where all you could hear was the beating of a heart. My heart felt like it would explode. I’d built my entire life around an event like this, and it had come to pass, because I hadn’t kept my head down.
    The beam of light grew closer. I could tell approximately where the intruder stood and how far he was from me. I wasn’t going to try to negotiate or ask questions. I was going to attack now and worry about the details later.
    The beam grew closer, and I brought the bat up. I was ready to strike when Bruno ran across the hallway and into the spare room. The light stopped and turned in my direction. I had no choice but to attack. I wasn’t quite sure where the intruder was, but I came out swinging. I swung wildly, not hitting anything with the first three misses. The fourth swing hit something hard, and I heard a noise come out of the intruder.
    Like playing a game of