She left her phone next to her coffee mug when she went to the bathroom; there was a Jansport backpack resting in the little alcove where the cash register was, propped against the wall. Before she could think, she grabbed it, carrying it to the bathroom and locking the door. She set it in the sink, unzipping it and peering inside. Notebooks. She took one out and flipped through, finding a series of sketches. The kid was not half bad. His drawings were on the religious side, but she couldn’t hold that against him. His wallet was in the front pocket: Gideon Derek Browley, eighteen years old, his address the compound. Remorse washed through her with such violence she began to tremble.

Sitting abruptly on the closed seat of the toilet, she stared at his driver’s license. Half the shock was in knowing she’d been right. If her math was correct, he’d have been born when Sara was seventeen, two years after Rainy had left. And how many underage mothers had there been in the twenty years since she’d fled from that place? And, of course, none of the children took Taured’s last name, because if he was caught, he’d go to prison for statutory rape. Stuffing the license back into the brown leather wallet, she dug further, uncovering nothing particularly interesting until her fingers closed around an envelope. It was from the art school at Hunter College, City University of New York. He’d been accepted into the graphics program. Poor kid. Taured would never let him leave...unless. Maybe he was planning to take things into his own hands. She put everything back except the notebook and, borrowing one of his charcoal pencils, she wrote him a note while sitting on the toilet lid. When she was done, she slipped the bag back into the alcove and went to eat her eggs.

By the time Rainy was finished with her food, the breakfast bar had filled with a variety of singles and one family of four. Sara’s son. She could see Sara in the way he slouched his shoulders. He darted around the dining room, a coffeepot forever in his hand. Around eight, another server came in and Derek came over with her check, looking almost embarrassed to hand it to her. She handed him cash and he started digging around in his apron to make change, but Rainy said, “Keep it.”

“Really?” he said. Rainy had left him an eighty-dollar tip.

“Yeah,” she said, standing up. “I wanted to leave my town, too.” She bent down to grab her phone from the table and saw that she had texts from Grant in addition to the Tiger Mountain group.