She wanted to speak to her mother again. If she didn’t find her now, she’d be gone for weeks, maybe months. They had never gone on a mission trip without Shanna and Desiree; what would her mother think of that? Frank had been there long before Lorraine and Summer arrived on that dusty day. He was one of Taured’s first recruits, and her mother had hated him on sight. She could remember the way her mother tensed whenever Frank walked into a room. She would not be happy he was going. Taured did that on purpose, Summer thought as she made her way back to the side of the building. He was angry with her mother.

It wasn’t until she was back in the dorms at Kids’ Camp, riffling through her clean clothes for a new T-shirt and jeans, that she remembered the items she’d taken. They suddenly felt hot against her skin. Looking around, Summer saw that there were only a couple girls milling about. Everyone else was in the orchard at this time of day. Slipping into a stall in the girls’ bathroom, she pulled the floppy disk and photo out of the waist of her pants, then reached behind to slide the driver’s licenses from her back pocket. She had to hide them for now. God, if anyone found them in her things... She could sneak to the computer lab later and have a look at what was on the disk, but she had to find her mother before lights out. Changing into clean clothes, she put all four items inside of her sports bra and went to find her mother.

Lorraine was not in her room. While Summer was there, she reached into her shirt, pulling the four stolen items from her bra. Looking around the room, she searched for a place to hide them. The wardrobe? Too obvious. Under the mattress? What if her mother found them while changing the sheets? She spotted a crocheted pillow her mother had brought from their apartment in California. Lorraine had told her daughter that it once belonged to her grandmother, and Lorraine had used it to hide Summer’s dad’s love letters from her parents by pressing the letters into the stuffing. Summer had found the hole in the seam many times as a child, sticking her fingers inside in search of a forgotten love letter. Now, she widened the opening with her finger and pressed everything inside. Instead of love, she was putting sin into the pillow; it felt wrong. She set it back on the bed and backed out of the room, making sure everything looked okay.