“You don’t need to change,” I answered, but it was too late; he’d already disappeared into his bedroom. A few minutes later he emerged, his little face peeking out from a puffy silver space robot costume. Two springy antennae adorned the hood, wobbling wildly with each step Beau took.

“Ready, Mom!”

I decided not to ask. Opening Herman’s door, I ushered Beau into his booster, and we screeched backward out of the garage, hitting the river of orange water at the curb hard enough to send up a ten-foot spray. “Wow!” yelled Beau. “Cool.” I adjusted the wipers to their highest setting, sending them swishing across the windshield with just enough force to achieve minimum visibility. I had to inch along the street. A toxic mixture of anger and fear commingled in my throat, threatening to choke me. If I could barely drive in this deluge, how was some teenage boy—named Crash, no less—likely to fare? If Rorie managed to survive her joyride, she’d still be risking death at the hands of her own mother.

I pulled over to check the GPS on the tracking app, which I’d opened on my phone. Pulling over made me uneasy—it would be difficult to avoid rear-ending a stalled car in this mess, even on the side of the road—but luckily Rorie’s dot hovered only a few blocks away. Inching forward with the hazard lights blinking, I navigated to the spot where I expected to find my daughter.

A parking lot. Ordinarily this would make things tricky: I didn’t know what kind of car Crash Bettis drove, and the GPS dot wasn’t precise enough to distinguish between cars in a lot. But despite the low amount of circulating virus here, Atlanta remained buttoned-up; many people still avoided going out if they didn’t have to. The lot contained only a handful of cars, and even in the lashing rain, I could rule out a few of them on sight. An Oldsmobile Cutlass; no. That was an old person’s car. Crash could have borrowed his mom’s SUV or his dad’s sports car, but I was willing to bet a high school kid had his own car, and it probably wasn’t a minivan or anything too pricey. There. Over in the far corner of the lot, a silver Mazda hatchback had stopped lengthwise under a cluster of oak trees, about as far away from the other cars as possible. That must be it.

I hazarded a glance in the rearview mirror. Beau, his antennae twanging, sat in the back seat placidly awaiting elucidation as to what we were doing circling around this random parking lot in the rain. Easing into a spot a few spaces down from the Mazda, I gripped the door handle hard enough to turn my knuckles white and forced myself into a fifteen-second pause as I adjusted my mask. “I’ll be right back, honey,” I said finally.

“Okay, Mom.”