A man who had never seen either of us as people at all — only as an address, and the obstacle standing in front of it.

Chapter 15 — She Saved Us

Ten minutes later Christopher’s phone rang again.

They had picked up Renata two blocks from my mother’s house.

In her bag: a copy of the forged school note, the key to an apartment she had rented for the afternoon, and a string of texts from Stephanie telling her exactly when to take the child.

Abigail had seen none of it.

My mother had kept her in a back bedroom the whole time with a stack of cartoons, and to this day my daughter does not know how close it came, and I intend to keep it that way until she is grown enough to hear it as a story about her own courage rather than her own danger.