They had moved back to the area eight months ago, for a job Rosalind had taken.

That was when my mother’s private investigator had spotted them — a chance sighting that reactivated the entire six-year-old machine of surveillance and legal threat, and frightened Rosalind into trying, once again, to disappear.

She had been at the airport that morning to leave the city.

She had not known I would be there.

I had not known she existed.

There had been no plan, no orchestration, nothing more than a thirty-five-minute mechanical delay on a flight to Baltimore, dropping me at a window at the exact moment my whole real life happened to be sleeping against a wall a few yards away.