There’s no cell service out there for most of the route.

As far as they know, I’m either still riding in the coach car where they left me, or I’m frantically running around a platform in Wisconsin trying to find their sandwiches.

They have no idea I’m here.

They have no idea any of this exists.

They believe the plan is working perfectly.”

There was a certain grim satisfaction in laying it out, in describing the two of them sealed in their warm cabin, congratulating themselves, utterly unaware that fifteen hundred miles ahead of them their entire world had already come apart in a mansion foyer, that the photographs were already spread across a retired judge’s hands, that the reckoning was already, quietly, being organized.

They had built their whole scheme on the assumption that I was powerless and unaware, a pregnant woman to be managed and disposed of.