Perhaps it was the fact that she wasn't constantly on the move that gave her the opportunity to think about her predicament. When she was moving from place to place with no plans or hopes for the future, she didn't exactly have the time to think about how lonely she was. Survival was more important. She had to focus on the basic elements - food, water, shelter, heat. Anything else was secondary and could be put off to consider another day. The luxury of knowing where she was going to sleep each night and where her next meal was going to come from opened her up to a lot of other concerns she hadn't had to consider much since running away from her son's eleventh birthday party while her husband writhed on the kitchen floor in his own blood.