An hour later the text came through: a hotel name, and a room number with a winking face. We would meet on Tuesday—three days away—at 9:00. Des lifted the screen for me to see, threw her arms around me, and whooped. I wasn’t happy or afraid. Instead, an eerie calm slid into my gut, where the anger had been.

That night I put the purse on my nightstand. I would have liked it, if I hadn’t known where it had come from. If it didn’t make me feel nauseated to picture it on the side of the road—what road? God, why hadn’t I asked?—and what it meant that it had been abandoned. Maybe she got mugged, I told myself. It happened often enough. Des said the girls at the club all carried mace or pepper spray, because thieves targeted strippers, waitresses, bartenders. The ones they knew would have cash. After all this with Tom was over, I would try to find Peaches again. Ask her where the bag had come from, how many days it had been since she found it. Maybe whatever Peaches had to say wouldn’t lead me anywhere. Maybe whatever had happened to the bag was the betrayal the cards had said to watch out for. But something told me it was deeper than that. Me, Peaches, Lily, Julie Zale. And that it wasn’t over yet.

I KNEW that girls bled the first time, but it hurt so much that it felt like something must have gone wrong. That kind of pain could not be normal. But when he asked if I was okay, I told him I was fine, tried to shape my grimace into a smile. I wouldn’t have believed me if I were him, but that was the thing about people—they wanted to believe whatever was easiest to accept.