The cabbie seemed to understand their urgency and he turned the car around, the cab’s tires squealing as he shot forward. Summer twisted around to look out the back window. The dust spun up behind them, like a curtain. She thought she saw Dawn come out of the shed, but then her mother pulled her down.

“Don’t look back, Summer.”

She sank into the seat, the smell of cigarette smoke rising to meet her. It was then, as her hand accidentally slipped inside her mother’s bag, that she felt the hard metal. Pulling one side of the bag toward her, she looked inside to see a gun. It was small and cold to the touch. When she looked up, her mother’s eyes were large in warning. She was not to react, she understood. Turning to look out the window, she pretended she hadn’t seen anything at all, but it made sense now, the way Dawn had behaved. Her mother must have shown her the gun to scare her. But where had she gotten the gun? She must have snuck off to buy one while she was on a mission trip and hidden it, waiting for this day.

And the cab that had shown up at exactly the right time. That one seemed easier to explain; her mother must have secretly called for it from the compound somehow. Why hadn’t she told Summer the plan?

“Where are we going?” she asked eventually. Her nose, still tender, was hard to breathe through. They were passing Red’s, and the straggly little town, Friendship, that was built around a famous cactus.

“New Mexico, to Grandma and Grandpa.” There was no dread in her mother’s voice when she spoke about her parents this time. It sounded nice to Summer, who wanted to be anywhere else.

She was looking earnestly out her mother’s side window now at the row of pastel houses, one of which had broken toys in the yard.

“What is it?” Lorraine snapped.

“I buried something there,” she told her mother, “by the cactus.” She thought Lorraine would ask what, but she was the one looking behind them now, checking the road. Summer watched the depressing little patch of buildings pass by.

“Does it matter?”

She didn’t know. She hadn’t told her mother what she’d taken, just what she’d heard. Despite who she had stolen from, she still felt the shame of being a thief, and—even more so—the shame of what she’d seen in the photo.