“I just don’t know how I can believe you.” She gave Emma a long, searching look, her eyes wounded. Then she slammed the door. The lock clicked shut.

Slowly, Emma turned to face the street. Corcoran resolutely watched the reporters. They were in a frenzy, microphones bristling from the crowd, her name the only word she could make out in their screams. Step by step, she walked back down the slate path. She felt like she was moving through deep water, her body slow and heavy.

A microphone appeared under Emma’s chin. She looked up to see the local reporter who had been covering both Nisha’s and Sutton’s deaths, now in a cobalt blue suit. Her hair was even bigger in person than it looked on TV. “Tricia Melendez from Channel Five. Can you tell me whether the rumors are true? Are you the girl who was presumed dead?”

Corcoran forced a way through the crowd, looking menacingly at the reporters on either side of him. They parted when they saw his uniform. He put a hand on Emma’s back and pushed her gently toward the car.

Once they were safely inside, he looked at her. “Where can I take you?”

She hesitated. Ethan’s face bloomed in her mind, but involving him was the last thing she wanted. She’d already gotten Alex in trouble. She didn’t want anyone else to suffer because of her.

But she didn’t have anywhere else to go. She gave Corcoran Ethan’s address.

I looked out the rear window. My home receded into the distance, smaller and smaller until finally we turned a corner . . . and it was gone. A sick, empty feeling opened inside of me. My mother didn’t know that in banishing Emma, she was banishing me, too. It had been hard enough, not being able to touch my family or talk to them. Now I couldn’t even watch them.

It was like I was losing them all over again.

21 - Shelter from the Storm

21

SHELTER FROM THE STORM

Emma gripped the sides of the squad car’s passenger seat as the officer sped around a corner. She craned her neck to look behind them at the reporters trailing in their wake, news vans and cheap rental cars harrying the cop’s bumper like a pack of hungry wolves. She glanced at Corcoran. His lips were pursed in a tight, stoic line.

“Is there any way to keep them from following us?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Corcoran didn’t answer. His eyes flickered up to the rearview mirror. Then, without warning, he jerked the steering wheel into a hairpin turn, down an alley that ran behind a Starbucks and a Mediterranean deli. Emma watched three vans streak past. His hands steady on the wheel, he then floored the gas, and with an angry squeal of tires the squad car shot through the intersection just as the light turned red.