The thing inside the rabbit’s ear was a tracking tag. I know that now because Denise Harlan cut the seam open with the tiny folding scissors she kept on her keychain, tipped the stuffing into her palm, and said, very calmly, that we needed to move right now.

Three minutes earlier I had been frozen on a bench in Deeds Point MetroPark watching a red pickup truck roll through the parking lot like my worst thought had taken shape in steel and chrome and was moving toward us at an idle. Three minutes later my daughters and I were following a woman I had never met through a side door of the park’s small nature center while she spoke into her phone with the even, practiced voice of someone who has learned to make fear obey instructions.

“Female adult, two children,” she said. “Confirmed tracker. Likely active pursuit. Need an emergency transport pickup at the south service entrance.”

That was the first moment in nine days that I felt something stronger than terror. I felt handled, in the best possible sense of that word, in the sense of being in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing and was doing it on my behalf without asking me to justify the need.

Denise was fifty-eight, silver-haired, with the kind of posture that certain women develop over decades of being the person a room depends on, upright and alert and impossible to rush. I found out later she had spent twelve years as a school counselor and eight before that as an emergency room nurse, and that the posture was occupational, that you develop it when you spend your working life in the presence of people in crisis and you understand that your own steadiness is part of what you are offering. By the time she saw me in the park she was volunteering twice a week with a domestic violence outreach program that partnered with county shelters and public libraries, driving her own car, spending her own time, showing up at parks and waiting rooms and bus stops to be the person who notices.