Lying there in the dark, I worked out on my phone, under the covers where the light wouldn’t show, exactly how I would reach the state police the moment we needed them — not the local number, the one Julian said his mother could reach inside of, but the direct line to the barracks in the city, saved and ready under a name in my contacts that would mean nothing to anyone reading over my shoulder.

I don’t know what made me do it.

Some instinct left over from the ledger, I think, some part of me that had been paying attention for months and did not trust our clean simple plan to stay clean and simple.

Because the plan was too clean.

We were going to wait for her to leave and slip out and drive away, and it depended entirely on Victoria doing the ordinary thing, and I had lived in that house long enough to know that Victoria did not do the ordinary thing when something she owned was at stake.

So I set it up.