“It is, and the new furniture is due in about an hour, so the delivery chaps should have been and gone by the time you arrive. I don’t know how we’re going to put it all together, I’m sure, but I suppose we’ll work it out somehow. Oh, and before you ask, yes, I remembered to bring a tool kit.”

“Super-nan,” Jasmine cheered.

Surprised again by her daughter’s high spirits, and relieved, Claudia said to her mother, “Shall we pick up some groceries on the way?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll do it, and if I run out of time we can always get pizza delivered.”

And here was another concern, how matter-of-fact her mother was sounding when there was absolutely nothing matter-of-fact about what they were doing.

Was she the only one who was scared out of her mind?

She needed to do as Jasmine said and stop stressing.

“Have you checked if you’re being followed?” her mother asked, setting Claudia’s nerves off again.

“She’s doing it every thirty seconds,” Jasmine chimed in, “but I scoped the whole neighborhood before we left and I promise you no one was there, so no one watched us leave.”

“Good girl,” her grandmother praised. “What have you done with your old phones?”

“We left them at the house,” Claudia replied, “along with our laptops, tablets, and keys. Obviously we made sure there was nothing left on them to give anything away. Do you think it was the right thing to do? Should we have brought them with us?”

“We discussed it,” her mother reminded her, “and we decided they needed to stay there.”

This was true, but now Claudia wasn’t so sure it had been such a good idea. Great escape planners they were, but since they’d never done anything remotely like it before they’d had no experience to draw on, only Internet advice, which didn’t seem to have let them down yet.

“I have the replacement iPads and computers here,” her mother was saying, “so we can set them up later.”

“Did you abandon your old stuff too?” Jasmine asked.

“Of course. Actually, I tossed them in the lake—and very freeing it was too.”

Claudia didn’t know whether to be shocked or impressed. The image of her respectable mother, owner of a contacts book to rival a royal’s, driving up to the lake near her home—or rather, old home since she’d left it yesterday—and ending her previous life with a random fling of Apple devices into a wildlife reservoir was hard to get her head around.

Suddenly it was making her laugh. It was hysteria, of course, for there was nothing funny about it, but now that she’d started she was finding it difficult to stop.

“OK, she’s losing it,” Jasmine declared. “I’ll calm her down and we’ll call when we’re about an hour away.”