He is, in fact, committing international kidnapping, and every mile that plane flies toward home carries him closer to the consequences, not further from them.” I gripped the edge of the granite desk, and let myself believe, for the first time since I had woken to that terrible silence, that I would get my daughter back, and that the people who had taken her would answer for it, and that the isolation Evelyn had counted on had already, without her knowledge, ceased to exist.

Chapter 10 — Exactly Who Comes for You

“And Evelyn?” I asked.

The name came out of me with all the weight of that note still crumpled in my fist. Let’s see who comes for you now.

There was a pause on the line, and then Martin Shaw, the humorless man who had made me memorize a number, let out a low, dry chuckle that contained no warmth whatsoever, only the grim satisfaction of a professional who has just been handed a case that will not lose.

“Your mother-in-law,” he said, “is about to find out exactly who comes for you.” I stood in that lobby, six thousand miles from home, barefoot, with two cruel notes crushed in my hand, and I felt something I had not felt in the four hours since I woke to the silence, and had not, in truth, felt in a great many years inside the Vance family: I felt the ground solidify beneath me.