She couldn’t look at him. She felt so ashamed about the upload on Esme’s device. She’d figured out how to delete it. The message had to be the work of some other child. Some smartass kid who could already write and spell and was doing her mother’s bidding—and who’d known to upload the artwork to Esme’s device. Had some self-righteous mother murmured to her child something about Ronnie before they’d even gotten into the classroom?

Could people tell, somehow, how small of a house she’d grown up in, and that she knew a lot of people who’d never learned to read, and that no one where she was from amounted to anything? Maybe they could see the sort of people she’d had to endure just by looking at her face: The men at Kittens. Her sister. Jerrod.

Or maybe someone’s husband had employed Topless Maids in the past. One of those mothers had a nanny-cam or something, and up popped Ronnie and her bare tits. Maybe this was the mom’s way of subtly shoving Ronnie out, saying they didn’t want her kind at Silver Swans.

She glanced at Lane, who was flicking the automatic lighter to reignite one of the votive candles. She was dying to tell him about the note, but how could she? It would beg the question of why?

“By the way,” Lane said, “I called you this afternoon, but your cell went straight to voicemail. Stuck with a client?” He widened his eyes. “You didn’t get vomited on again, did you?”

“Oh. Um . . .” Ronnie kept her gaze fixed on the enormous palm across the street, which, at this hour, was a midnight-blue silhouette. It was so much effort to keep up the lie about her fake job. Half the time, she feared she got the details wrong, or that Lane would call the fake number she’d provided instead of her cell. She kept telling herself too much time had passed by now, or that she’d come clean later. She should have just told Lane at the start, gotten it over with. If he would have dropped her, then so be it. The problem was that Ronnie loved Lane. Adored Lane. Also, telling him now was so wrapped up in telling him so many other things that she couldn’t. She hadn’t even told him she was from a tiny town in Pennsylvania—she’d said it was a tiny town in West Virginia. And for all she knew, her story was all over the news—a stripper disappears with a little girl in tow. Just do a Google search with the real facts, and there it might be. Even if Ronnie could have told Lane some of the truth . . . well, she hadn’t, and now too much time had passed, and there was no way.