A woman tells her twelve-year-old daughter to act normally as they prepare to leave the child's abusive father. The daughter wakes up and makes breakfast, packs her brothers’ bags with “clothes, a toothbrush, one book for comfort” and then leads the boys to the school bus. The girl’s face is bruised, so the bus driver obliges when she asks that they be dropped off before they get to school, as she and her brothers need to meet their mother. Once they meet her, they get in the car to leave town, but first they have to stop by the mother’s place of work so that she can pick up her paycheck. While they’re there, the father comes to look for the mother. Her coworker lies and says she’s at the hospital because he’d beaten her up so badly. He goes to look for her in the hospital, and the woman and her children get away. Driving, the family isn’t sure where they should go. They worry about speeding because the father is a police officer, and if they’re pulled over, they know they’ll be sent back to him. One of the boys says they should ditch the car and take a bus somewhere. The mother has a panic attack and stops driving. The daughter imagines a new life for them, if the mother would just drive the car, but then police lights flash around them, and the woman is dragged out of the car by her hair. Many years later, the daughter's own daughter recounts the story, telling how her mother, as an adult, still has “a silent wind” blowing inside her, a wind “that is dark and ceaseless and raging within.”