He didn’t say much. He asked, once, if the girls were warm enough. He asked if I wanted him to turn the heat up.

When we passed a drive-through he pulled in without being asked and bought the girls food, and watched in the mirror as Holly fell asleep with a french fry still in her hand, and something moved across his face that I couldn’t read.

I didn’t trust it. I didn’t trust him. I had no reason to, and every reason not to, and I told myself to stay alert, to keep one hand on the situation.

It would be weeks before I understood that the thing I kept waiting to see in him — the angle, the price, the cruelty under the kindness — simply wasn’t there.

That same night, back in Palm Springs, Agatha Shields picked up her phone and called the police, and told them that I had stolen three million dollars from her charity and abducted her grandchildren.

And by morning she had given a statement to the press demanding custody of my daughters, calling me an unfit mother who was using her own children to seduce the richest bachelor in the state.