“Are you okay back there?” a woman said from the main compartment. She had a sweet Southern accent.

Matt pulled himself up on the seat back so he could see into the crowded cabin.

“It’s great. Thank you for letting me hitch a ride.”

“You let us know if you need anything, hon.” Her voice held a motherly hint of concern.

Matt spent the next two hours bouncing around in the back, watching out the rear window as they cruised south on Highway 307. It could’ve been any nondescript road in the US, except maybe there was more litter. Or maybe that was just Matt's current mindset, focusing only on the gloom. These weren't exactly the ideal circumstances under which to visit Mexico for the first time.

It was nearly five o’clock. They’d arrive soon. He’d have just enough time to get to the police station, sign the papers, and make it back to the Cancún airport for his nine o’clock return flight to New York. Agent Keller said they could extend the stay if needed. But he had no interest in seeing the beaches, ruins, or other sites. In and out.

The seat back blocked Matt’s view of the cabin, but he could make out some of the travelers up front in the reflection of the van’s window. He spied three kids, under ten by the looks of them, draped all over their parents. Even in the distorted reflection, the mom and dad looked bone tired. He thought of his family in a van like this one: Tommy with his face pressed to the window; Dad lost in his thoughts, pondering some Danny conspiracy; Maggie making an agenda for the trip; Mom with her nose in a book.

Matt pulled up that last text Maggie had sent him, the one Keller had taken an interest in. It was a photo of Matt’s father. It was zoomed in on his face, with a road behind him and what looked like the entrance to a business—a nightclub, maybe. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Scratch that. It was slightly unusual that Maggie would send Matt a shot of their father, given tensions of late.

In a sociology class at NYU, Matt had read about a study finding that by the time kids are eighteen, they’ve had an average of 4,200 arguments with their parents. Matt and his father had probably shattered that mean. It hadn’t always been like that. Before Danny’s arrest, Dad had been the one to encourage Matt’s interest in filmmaking, buying him moviemaking software, researching old Super 8 cameras, setting up screening parties for Matt’s short films. It wasn’t football, but Dad—and Mom, too—seemed genuinely impressed with his work. By the time he’d won his first film contest senior year, it barely went noticed in the Pine home. Dad had Danny, Maggie had Dad, Mom had Tommy.