As if it could make a difference. At thirty thousand feet, she felt as trapped as if in an underground dungeon. Her headache was easing. Someone had found a bottle of ibuprofen in the first aid kit and she had swallowed three of them without water. She had put six more in the pocket of her shirt. If she got out of this, she wanted to imagine in her helplessness, she would call for a congressional investigation into how this happened to them. How it had been done to them. Sam had told her about the fully comped vacation. “A done deal,” he had said, the first she had heard it. Days later, he had given her the envelope containing the first-class airline tickets and the letter from Resorts Worldwide promising “deluxe accomodations for two, all expenses paid.” Someone had done the deal and then done what? Sold the information? Auctioned it to the highest bidder? Did it make any difference in a world in which everything was for sale, and you were a schmuck if you ever paid retail?

More likely, she knew, she was not going to get out of this. Her story was going to run only a little while longer, a loose end that just needed cleaning up. All she could hope for was the courage to keep the people who had ordered Sam’s death from feeling they had won anything from her. The crazy person these others had mentioned. Chino. What they had told her was that Sam’s death had been almost instantaneous. She wasn’t going to be so lucky. She was going to be able to think about what was happening to her for as long as they wanted. As the crazy person, Chino, wanted. All the more reason not to let any of these animals see what was going on inside her. If she had the courage.

And it seemed a terrible way for things to finish up, with nothing to show for the years she and Sam had been separated by school, the shoeboxes of letters they’d exchanged and she’d saved for the children they would never have. Amy had to push that kind of thinking as far from herself as she could.

The pilot slowed the engines and she felt the plane begin to descend. They were still over water. She didn’t dare think about anything but what Sam had gone through for her. In that sense, she was already in one of those shoeboxes herself, an artifact, but on another level, a whole new plane of existence.