Then she looked back at the big filing cabinets in the corner. Against her better judgment, she did want to search. It wasn’t a list she wanted to find, though. She needed to know what Piper knew about her.

Her mind again snapped back to the memory of Vanessa on the ground in her dirty house. Ronnie’s sister wasn’t moving. “Nessie,” Ronnie whispered, jostling Esme in her arms. She knelt down. Put her face to her sister’s mouth and felt shallow breath on her cheek. Vanessa was alive, anyway. For now. “Nessie,” she whispered again. Vanessa didn’t stir. “Vanessa,” Ronnie repeated, tears blurring her vision. “Wake up. Please.”

A thud came from the back room. Ronnie straightened. Jerrod had come to. In moments, he would find them. “I’m sorry,” she told her sister.

On her drive out of town, she’d wept hysterically, certain that her sister had died and that Jerrod was alive and furious. At a rest stop, Esme was fussy—she didn’t want to be changed, she refused the cut-up apple Ronnie offered. As they sat in a booth around truckers and traveling families, Esme started wailing, and Ronnie was stricken with terror, certain people would know that this wasn’t her child. Esme was wailing because she’d been taken away from her parents, surely, even though that house was a deathtrap, a slowly boiling pot of water and Esme a frog.

Ronnie had waited for the police to swarm, but they didn’t. Instead, families glanced at her exhaustedly but sometimes commiseratively. When she carried Esme back to the car, the little girl cheered up. They played a two-year-old’s version of I Spy. Esme smiled.

As time passed, and when no one came searching for her, when lightning didn’t strike her down, when the sun rose every morning and Esme started to speak in full sentences and reach for her and call her Mama, it all felt divined. Ronnie hadn’t meant to take Esme away from Vanessa. Jesus, of course not. But she couldn’t deny things were better because she had.

But Piper can’t know any of that, she told herself now. It’s impossible.

Still, Ronnie stepped into the office. Everything was so white and clean that Ronnie feared her shoe treads would leave incriminating marks. She beelined for a filing cabinet along the wall. It looked like it might hold important information. Pulling her sleeve over her hand, she carefully pulled open the top drawer, but she found only tax forms and other paperwork.

“Ronnie!”

She turned. Andrea, still hovering in the hallway, pointed to a drawer in Piper’s desk. “That drawer was locked. Maybe you can find a key.”