What I really hope is that Beatrix is upstairs right now, throwing open the front door and sprinting down the driveway, arms flailing at whoever happens to be jogging past, hollering for them to call the police. With us deep in the bowels of the basement, now would be her chance. We wouldn’t hear the alarm pad’s warning beep from where we’re standing, not until the sixty seconds were up and the sirens started wailing. By then she’d be far from the house. I might die here in this dusty basement, but at least Beatrix wouldn’t. With any luck, she’ll live to be a hundred.

The man shoves me in the shoulder, pressing me forward. “Let’s go.”

The thought of Beatrix growing up like I did, without a mother, punches the air from my chest, a dagger twisting in my heart. No waving to me from the first chair of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. No scolding me to stop bawling in the front pew when she gets married. No handing me my first grandchild. These are the things both of us will miss if I die here today.

But Beatrix can still finish school. She can still fall in love, get her heart broken, celebrate birthdays and weddings and Christmases. It won’t be long before she forgets my face, my voice and smile and smell, the way I tug on her ringlets or tickle that spot behind her ear, but she’s still so young. Her grief will turn wooly and imprecise, a general malaise for the loss of a mother she barely knew and can no longer remember.

I know because it happened to me.

That’s why I gave up the career I loved, why I’m room mom and snack mom and library reading-time mom, why I cart them all over town, to soccer and music lessons and trips to the library and zoo, why I swallow my impatience at having to ask them three times to clean their room and sweetly ask them a fourth. I tried my best to fill the gap my mother left with all the love I have for my children. If nothing else, Beatrix will remember that her mother bent over backward to care for her, that I filled the house with happiness and love.

I just won’t be here to see it.

“Move it.”

With the man on my heels, we search the rest of the basement. I sweep the space from back to front, calling for Beatrix until my throat is sore. Every move is a calculated risk, every box I peek behind a potential land mine. Because as soon as I find Beatrix, she will be punished. And if we don’t, Baxter and I will be. Maybe not with a bullet to our heads—not yet, not until Cam gets here—but in the meantime, his switchblade can do a lot of damage.