I FOUND HER EAST of Amarillo, hitchhiking along Route 40 just shy of Shamrock. I left home weeks earlier, driving the three main routes from New Mexico to Arkansas and checking each gas station until the cashiers began to eye me suspiciously, a man alone, asking if they’d seen a girl. But then, one bright, hot afternoon like all the others, I saw a shape on the side of the road, and I knew that it was her.

I pulled over.

“Hiya,” I said when she approached my window, dust from the road billowing around her like the tired folding of wings. I knew she carried the knife she took from Foster Mom Number Four, and I could see in her eyes as she peered into the car that she wanted me to know she contained something dangerous. She was twelve and skinny enough to be ten, but she had the same air of confidence she had in Hell, and I could see how people might’ve thought she looked older. But I knew better. After all, I had been waiting for her.

“You don’t know me,” I started, words I had practiced many times in the years I had waited. “But I know you.”

She glared at me in the same exact way the version of her I knew would have, if I had ever used such a tacky line. It was odd, I realized as I took her in. To meet someone you know so well before you knew them. I found myself wanting to upload all of our memories together into her fresh new brain, to get my friend back. But then she put her thumb in her mouth and set her teeth against the firm skin of her cuticle, a move I had never seen her make before, and I realized she wasn’t my friend. She was the clay before my friend was made.

Which meant she could be anything.

I reached inside my shirt collar, gripped the ball chain around my neck in one fist, and yanked it free. She watched me without responding, but also without walking away.

I held out my fist to the passenger side, where she leaned against the window. When I opened it, I kept my eyes steady on her face.

She recognized the soda-tab dog tag immediately, and her whole body relaxed, rigid shoulders and knees ready to sprint melting enough to show the kid in her.

“Do you know where I can find the Farm?”

I nodded. I expected this question—when we dropped the lockbox and key off on Jason’s doorstep, Cal warned me she, too, would have a hard time letting go of her goal. But I could see something in her then that her adult self didn’t—couldn’t—remember.