“WHY DID YOU keep it?” Claudia demanded, almost as soon as Marcy returned the next day. “Make me understand, Mum, because we didn’t need him back in our lives, and now by opening this and reading it you’ve let him in.”

Marcy looked pale and tired, and only mildly upset that Claudia had gone through her room. “I don’t know why I kept it,” she admitted. “And as for opening it . . . I suppose I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away without knowing what it said. I’m sorry, I realize it wasn’t a good decision, but he still doesn’t know where we are. Isn’t that what really matters?”

“What matters,” Claudia argued, “is that he’s not going to give up until he finds us. He’s made that perfectly clear. Eugena is bound to be doing all she can to track us down and I’m afraid, as I’ve always been, that it’s only a matter of time before she succeeds. And this,” she added, hitting the letter, “reminds us that we need to be afraid.”

“So what are you saying?” Jasmine asked quietly. “That we should live in denial until someone catches up with us?”

Claudia’s heart clenched as her eyes closed.

“Or maybe,” Jasmine continued, “we should give the attaché case back.”

Marcy shook her head. “Even if we do that, there won’t be an end to it,” she said. “The names on those documents might not mean anything to us, but they obviously do to someone and the fact that we’ve seen them . . .” She let the sentence hang, not knowing how to finish it.

Jasmine said, “The money’s yours, Mum. We’re all agreed on that.”

“He stole a lot more from you than we’ve taken from him,” Marcy stated.

Claudia didn’t argue with that, for it was true, but she wanted him out of their lives, and if that meant giving everything back she would do it.

“I understand how you feel,” Marcy said, when Claudia voiced her thoughts, “but it’s not as simple as that. We have to think about how vengeful he is, and we agreed before you emptied the safe that having the money and the documents that incriminate others would be our protection. Our insurance. If anyone came after us we could threaten to go to the police . . .”

“But we didn’t know what we were doing,” Claudia cried in frustration. “Looking back, I can hardly believe how crazy we were to think we could get away with it, that we could just disappear and turn ourselves into other people who couldn’t be traced . . .”

“Crazy, maybe,” Jasmine put in quickly, “but we’ve done it.”

“Except the police know where we are,” Claudia reminded her, “so we haven’t been that successful.”