She looked out the motel’s doors. She looked like her mother; that’s why she’d thought to take her hair down to try to hide the resemblance on the camera—to use it as a curtain—but of course it had been too late. Stupid to put herself on his radar. She didn’t even have a car—she couldn’t get away quickly. She took the room key from the clerk’s hand, smiled, walked back outside into the thick air. The thought of Taured showing up to her room didn’t scare her; it was the thought of not being prepared for him that did. The room was sparse and ugly, but cleaner than she had expected. She took off her shoes and sat on the edge of the bed. She fell back onto the white coverlet and, holding her phone above her face, she texted the group.

Won’t be at dinner tonight. Got stuck doing some tourist thing. Tell you about it tomorrow.

She hit Send and dropped her phone. Would they even notice if she didn’t come back to the room later that night? She doubted it. They’d accept her text because she was the strange, independent one, anyway.

She stripped down to her underwear and crawled under the covers, naked except for her necklace and exhausted from the day—the weekend—the month. No one knows where I am, she thought as she drifted to sleep...an honest lie.

17

Then

They let her pack her mother’s personal things into two plastic milk crates they found in the kitchen. Her clothes and shoes were distributed to the remaining women, which left her with some of her mother’s books, a Bible, two old photo albums and a box of trinkets that had no meaning to Summer. She watched as the women carried off the rest, fighting over her mother’s nicest shoes, which were too big for Summer. All she took for herself was her mother’s necklace, a simple gold chain her dad had given her when they got married.

“It’s not much but it’s real,” her mother used to say. Now it was the only real, physical thing she had left of Lorraine. When she put it on for the first time, the metal had warmed instantly to her skin, but when she reached up to touch it, the gold had been cool beneath her fingertips.

“You’re getting a roommate,” Ama told her the morning after she’d seen her mother’s body in the freezer.