Kevin had left him just over two hours ago. The ferry always required all staff on board for the last few hours before they shipped out, so the two had said polite goodbyes outside the Pourhouse, and headed in separate directions. It was still early in the afternoon, but Ethan found himself little in the mood for roaming. He had walked up and down the streets, offering polite hellos to those who wanted to speak with him, exchanging a few words, before wandering on again. He stopped by one of the shops near the ferry to say hello to Gracie, the middle aged woman that ran the place. Tom was getting steadily more unreasonable, and before very long he was going to have to find somewhere new to stay. He had met Gracie one evening at the Pourhouse, and had found that, of all the people in town, she was the most likely to let him move in with her. It hadn't been hard to strike up a friendship; Gracie enjoyed talking, and Ethan had one of the most sympathetic ears in town to her stories. Everyone else had heard them all at least a dozen times.

He still wasn't quite ready to ask her if he could move in, so he made sure to stop by her shop at least every other day to talk for a little while. Gracie gossiped happily to him, telling him that she thought she had seen two young men passing through kissing, of all absurdities, and that another tourist who had come into town not all that long ago had an absolutely gorgeous black cat in her car. Gracie had wanted to go say hello, but she had only caught a glimpse of it while the car had been driving towards the dock. Ethan didn't really have much to say, but Gracie didn't need much prompting to keep talking.

Ethan said goodbye a while later, and had wandered out into the slowly gathering evening. For a moment he considered wandering towards the edge of town and finding a place to lay down in the forest, but the idea was not as appealing to him as it would normally be. So he found himself walking back to Tom's house instead, uncertain of what exactly he planned to do there, but willing to follow the whim nonetheless. He watched the sky as he walked, head tilted back and navigating primarily by the numbers. It was a beautiful day, with hardly a cloud in the sky. Considering that this was Washington, and it rained 230 days out of the year, this was a rare treat.

Perhaps if he hadn't been so distracted, he might have noticed the very important little number that started to flicker in the corner of his vision. Discounting it as an unexpected current of wind that was moving in, or the action of some nearby tourist, Ethan kept walking, up the hill and towards Tom's house. He allowed his eyes to flutter closed, navigating by sound and numbers. There was something almost exhilarating about that world of darkness, an abstract sort of terror that could only be countered by his self-confidence in the fact that he was not going to run into anything or anyone.

He was only a couple steps away from Tom's front porch when the number he had ignored before suddenly reasserted itself. Ethan stopped dead in his tracks, letting out a small gasp. There was that number again, the one that he had not seen since that night in Virginia a month ago. 100. There was a 100 percent chance he was about to be noticed by a certain, nameless FBI agent, the same FBI agent who had driven him all the way up to this far corner of the United States.

His eyes flashed open, and he found himself staring directly into her eyes. He stood frozen for less than half a second, before turning and bolting.

Had you asked him, he couldn't have entirely articulated why he had chosen to run. If she was here, she was looking for him, and there was nothing to be gained from staying in place, perhaps. But a more brutally honest version of that might be that it was as though a creature from his nightmares had suddenly popped into being before him. He had no plan, no expectations. All he knew was that he needed to get away.

He would have to plan while he ran.