“There,” Sadie-Grace said, pointing. We’d parked the car a block or so back. The Find Your Friend app, apparently, wasn’t that accurate. But we’d chosen the right direction to walk in, because there, parked in front of a metal garage that appeared to be full to the brim with lawn chairs and boxes and clothes, was Greer’s car.

“Very stealthy,” I commented. “A Porsche doesn’t stick out around here at all.”

Any reply the others might have made was cut off by a bloodcurdling, heartrending scream.

Summertime meant open windows—which almost certainly meant these houses didn’t have air-conditioning. Either way, there was nothing to block the sound of the scream, which just kept coming.

“It’s okay,” I heard a familiar voice say. “I’m here.”

Greer.

“Am I the only person thinking that Greer isn’t the one whose water broke?” Boone asked.

He wasn’t. I thought back to Aunt Olivia shutting me down when I’d tried to tell her the truth about Greer. She’d insisted that no woman would fake a pregnancy. I wondered what her stance would be if I told her that Greer had somehow secretly—and, given that her husband didn’t know and hadn’t signed any papers, almost certainly illegally—found herself a baby.

“You have to talk to your dad,” I told Sadie-Grace as another round of gritty, voice-breaking screams started up.

“I know,” Sadie Grace said, rising up to the tips of her toes in a relevé. “It’s just—eep!”

I was about to ask her what that was supposed to mean when I felt something hard and round press into the small of my back.

As a child, I’d been obsessed with many things—lock-picking and medieval torture and mixing the perfect martini. But one thing I’d never educated myself on was guns.

CHAPTER 41

Our new friends weren’t exactly chatty. So far, all we’d gotten out of them was a single word.

“Move.”

Apparently, we stuck out here about as much as Greer’s Porsche.

“She’ll want to talk to you.”

That was six more words, said as we were herded around the back of the house. Sitting on the porch was an old woman. She had her back to us, so I couldn’t see anything other than her bun—wiry, brown hair, streaked at least three-quarters gray. As we drew closer to the front of the chair, I took in her outfit: an oversize T-shirt, knee-length shorts that revealed legs with a farmer’s tan. She was barefoot now, but based on the tan lines, I assumed that was out of the norm.

Her skin was wrinkled and cracked, but it didn’t have that paper-thin look I’d seen on other people later in life. I hadn’t even seen her face yet, and I was already pretty sure that nothing about this woman was fragile.