AT FIRST, I THOUGHT THE alarms were in my head, and I felt a drop in my stomach. Something else I couldn’t explain—it was different than the feeling I got about Lily. Muddled. Strange.

But then I saw him raise his eyes at me, and I knew I hadn’t imagined the sound. Doors creaked open in the hallway. The tread of shoes on the carpet. Voices, sounding confused. Then a man, yelling down the hall.

“Everyone please proceed to the staircase. This is not a drill.”

The man knocked a lamp from the bedside table, cut his eyes toward me, shoved his cell phone into his pocket, and pushed his way out the door. I took a deep breath. I was aware of how I smelled, the ammoniac smell of a scared animal. But I grabbed my purse and ran toward the stairs.

The lobby was a mess of people. Potbellied security guards shined flashlights in the direction of the door, tried to yell over the crowd, and couldn’t make themselves heard. I ran to the revolving door and hailed a taxi. I had $20 in my purse. Probably not enough to get back, but I wouldn’t worry about that. I need to call the cops, I thought. But how would I ask them for help before I even knew where I was going? Then, when I looked in my purse, I almost laughed. The man had made me give him my phone, had locked it in the safe. I remembered the little electric beep beep beep as he entered the code.

The driver looked at me, unruffled by the way my chest was heaving. “The Black Horse Pike. The motels. As fast as you can.”

“Which motel?” he asked, pulling away from the curb.

“I’ll know when I see.” He shook his head. I knew what he was thinking—I was going to pick up a man, buy drugs, both. “Drive faster, please.”

Above us the white globes of the streetlights blurred by, and I knew I was right—I had seen them before. The buildings looked even grimmer in the dark, a row of six or seven of them, wild with weeds, perched on the edge of the marsh like they might one day get sucked in. I rolled down my window, listened to the shush of the reeds. Here. We were close to Lily. To all of them.

I studied the signs, all of them with broken, missing letters. Then I saw it, down the road—that setting sun, each ray lighting up one at a time then blinking out. The Sunset Motel.