My mother had not merely gone into hiding; she had been erased and replaced.

The woman named Philippa Ashgrove ceased to exist in every register and record, and in her place a different woman with a different name took up a small, quiet, watchful life, so that the daughter she had saved could grow up unhunted.

And I had been folded into a story so plain it was invisible: a little girl whose mother had died young, raised by a devoted widower.

Who looks twice at that?

It is one of the oldest and saddest stories there is, and its very sadness was the camouflage.

The Ashgroves were searching for a woman on the run with a child.