But once she started showing, well, that was it. Nobody wanted to drink their beer watching some chick who was knocked up.

So in a way, it all worked out okay. Sort of.

But in the back of her mind, Miranda was thinking about the kind of world she was going to bring this baby into. She hadn’t known, for several years now, a particularly respectable life. Not like her sister, Claire. She and Don had gotten married, they had a decent apartment now, not some place over a pizza joint. She had her secretary job, he had his job at Ford. Not that they’d have to worry that much about bringing any kid into the world. Claire couldn’t have kids, it turned out.

How crazy. Claire’s home was the perfect one in which to raise a child, but she couldn’t have one.

And I’m the one who’s pregnant, thought Miranda. Working in a bar with strippers and hookers and dope dealers.

I need my head read.

But she did have a man in her life. Eldon seemed excited about the idea of becoming a father. She would talk to him—she still had not told him that her real name was not Candace—about getting some sort of new life. Of leaving the Kickstart. Of getting respectable jobs. Of making a proper home for their baby.

“Yeah,” he would say. “That sounds like a good idea. Maybe I should start looking for something else,” he said. “Maybe I should take some courses too. You know what I’ve always been interested in? Electrical work. Wiring.”

“Electricians make a fortune,” Miranda said.

So she worked all the time in the upstairs office, doing the finances, turning dirty money into clean. It was a gift, no doubt about it.

And then one day, sitting upstairs at the computer, she knew this was it. She phoned down to the bar, asked for Eldon. “This is it,” she said.

It was a girl.

Her name was Katie.

CHAPTER 12

12

THE MOMENT I HEARD the front door close, I yanked on the cuffs. The stair railing didn’t budge but the cuffs cut sharply into my wrists and I winced from the pain. Already I could feel my fingers starting to go numb from reduced circulation. Outside, I could hear the door of my Virtue hybrid car open and close. The vehicle was so quiet, I didn’t hear it start or back out of the drive and pull away.

I hadn’t heard Trixie make any phone calls from upstairs, but I had to hope, certainly if I couldn’t get free on my own, that she’d keep her word and send someone to rescue me. The handcuff keys were on a table only ten feet away, but they might as well have been in the next town for all the good they did me now.