KAT

NOW

Obviously, I have been imagining a situation like this for months—everything grinding to a halt because someone has figured out we’re alive. In my head, it’s the woman who works at the country store, the one whose eyes linger on me sometimes as if there’s something she’d like to ask me.

Six months—we made it six months without anyone finding us or recognizing us. I have worked my goddamn ass off so we can stay here undetected—I’ve memorized every business in town with a security camera so we can avoid having our likenesses captured.

How? How? How?

It obviously was not me, because I do not make mistakes.

It sounds arrogant, but it’s not a quality I would wish on anyone. I don’t make mistakes because I can’t. Shoes left in the hall? I’d be hearing about my thoughtlessness for a week. Didn’t hear my father when he said dinner was ready? My laptop would be thrown into the wall, the essay I’d been working on lost to the ether.

I did not make a mistake here. Yes, I let Claire turn around. But I never looked back—I left nothing behind to explain how she wound up in Timsbury, New York.

Amos is waiting in the hall, listening, obviously ignoring my directive to get Claire ice. I grab him by the arm and shove him through the doorway to his bedroom. “How did she find us?”

Amos scowls, crosses to his dresser. “Why are you asking me?”

“Because you screwed up,” I snap.

“Bold of you to assume it was me.” He swaps his gun for a half-drunk bottle of Jack Daniels from his dresser and unscrews the top.

“So you’re saying it was either me or Jesse?”

“I’m saying I don’t know what the fuck happened.” Amos plops down on his bed. The room smells of wet skunk, an unwashed pile of clothes in the corner and a string of empty liquor bottles lined up on the windowsill.

Amos has been drinking more than usual the past few months. At first, I thought it was the guilt of what happened to Mike and my father driving him to numb himself. But then, he started disappearing for a day or two at a time, only to return with more cash and more booze. I shook him down and got him to admit he’d been making the trip to Burlington to sell to some of his old contacts.

He swore he was being careful, that none of them even knew his real name, that they were the type of people who would never talk to the police. Amos was known only as “Devin,” the name on his fake driver’s license. Thanks to Devin and his connections in Burlington, we have an assortment of fake IDs, and more cash flowing in, even if most of it goes to the liquor store in town.

I drag my hands down my face. “What are we going to do?”

“I mean, it’s obvious,” Amos says. “We have to kill her.”

“Be serious, Amos,” I snap.

Amos’s eyebrows knit together. He frowns, not breaking my gaze. It makes my stomach drop.

“No,” I say. “Absolutely not.”

Amos’s eyebrows shoot up. “Then we just let her go and wait for the cops to roll in?”

“I can try to talk to her,” I say. “She doesn’t know anything.”

Amos lowers the bottle of booze from his mouth. “What do you mean?”

I sit on the edge of Amos’s bed. “I never told her about my dad.”

“Okay.” Amos blinks at me. He opens his top drawer and begins to paw through the contents. “So let me get this straight. Mike almost killed her, you made her think you were dead, and she has no idea why. Yet you think if we let her go she’s going to keep what happened here a secret?”

“Nothing would have happened if you hadn’t hit her with a shovel.”

“She’d already found us!” Amos drops his voice. “Do you want to go to prison? Because once we get caught and your teary Dateline special is over, we’re going down for extorting Marian. Maybe manslaughter, if they can pin what happened to Mike and your father on us.”

I drop my hands from my face and look at Amos. “What? We didn’t make Mike run my dad over.”

Amos snorts. “Felony murder rule, look it up.”

The word murder sets off a snare of fear in me. With nothing to do over the past six months, I have had a lot of time to replay what happened on the mountain, to picture the aggrieved way Mike glanced at Amos when he said that Claire was alive.

I’d assumed Amos had been the one to convince Mike not to kill Claire after they encountered her on the trail; Amos had said Mike had panicked when he saw her cowering behind the rock, had decided to run after her after she took off, terrified and screaming.

But sometimes I wonder if the look Mike gave Amos was more reproachful; as if he’d had to convince Amos to leave Claire alive. After all, Amos had been the one who sounded so worried that Claire might have recognized his voice—so worried, in fact, he made the completely dumbass move of going to the lake house to talk to Claire, to see for himself what she remembered—

“You’re not touching her,” I say.

From his dresser drawer, Amos produces something that looks like a nicotine patch. He holds it up for me between two fingers. “You know what this is?”

“I don’t feel like playing guessing games, Amos.”

“It’s a fentanyl patch.” Amos sticks it in my face. “Get some booze in her, slip this on while she’s passed out, and bam, overdose.”

I swallow, my eyes on the Saran Wrapped square of plastic. “No.”

Amos’s eyes, bloodshot, oscillate like he didn’t even hear me. “We can ditch her car and body near her school. Who wouldn’t believe she was so fucked up over what happened to her that she decided to, you know—”

“No.”

Amos slaps the fentanyl patch on the top of his dresser so hard that the mirror on the wall above it rattles. “Then what do we do, Kat? Keep her locked in that room forever like Elizabeth Smart or some shit?”

“Amos. I’ll figure something out.” That pulsing behind my eye is back, right below my eyebrow scar.

“You’d better figure it out before Jesse gets home,” Amos says, before crossing through the doorway, leaving me alone in his room. “Once he knows she’s here, he’s gonna absolutely lose it.”