The L train from Jefferson Street station took her directly into Manhattan, to Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street, just a ten-minute walk from the School of Visual Art’s main campus. The train was packed, as was the norm when she had morning classes. Nat was lucky to get a seat, even if she was wedged between an overweight guy who smelled like salami and a kid whose music was so loud she could hear every word of the rap song he was listening to through his headphones.

She kept her eyes on the floor—the big guy next to her precluded her digging her phone out of her coat pocket—her gaze blank. Locals didn’t gawk at the colorful cast of characters sharing their morning commute. More than two years in the city, and it still gave her a little thrill to think of herself that way. As a local. A New Yorker. Not many kids from Blaine, Washington, made it all the way to New York City. To Seattle, sure. Some adventurous types might get as far as San Francisco. But Nat had outdone them all.

She was ten the first time she realized she was destined to outgrow her hometown. The community of roughly five thousand people abutting the Canadian border on a briny stretch of the Pacific was quaint, picturesque, comfortable. . . . It had a seedy side, too, a kind of darkness, a toughness peculiar to the region. But it was too provincial, too constricting for an artistic soul; she knew it even then. Her father must have had a similar revelation, because that’s when he walked out on Nat and her mom. It had been a difficult marriage, and Andrew Murphy was a hard man to love. He was prone to angry outbursts, long silences, critical diatribes (he would later blame his undiagnosed depression). Nat and her mother had wept when he stormed out, never to return. But it was his rejection, more than his absence, that hurt. It didn’t take long for them to realize they were better off without him.

While Nat resented her father’s desertion, she also envied it. Her dad had been restless, bored, and unhappy, so he had packed up and left his wife and only child. He’d gone to work as a pit boss in a big flashy casino. Did the glitz of Las Vegas provide the stimulation he’d missed in Blaine? The excitement his wife and young daughter couldn’t provide? Nat was angry at him; she hated him. But this didn’t stop her fantasizing about a life with him in Sin City.

They would live in a small apartment just off the strip. At night, when her dad worked, she’d wander the neon city, a girl alone under the lights. She’d meet blackjack dealers and showgirls, acrobats and mafiosos. In her fantasies, her dad was a peripheral character. Natalie was effectively an orphan; a debauched Pippi Longstocking.

But Nat was not as selfish as her father. She could not abandon her mom . . . though she needn’t have worried about Allana Murphy. The woman was blond and beautiful, only thirty-five when her husband left her. The suitors were at the door as soon as word got out. (The dating pool was small but active in a town that size.) Her mom had a handful of boyfriends over the next couple of years, no one to whom Nat had gotten attached. And then, when Natalie was thirteen, her mom married Derek Heppner. He was a big man, a builder, with a reddish-blond beard that made him look like a Viking. He adored her mother, and had seemed fond of Natalie, at first. But then everything changed, and Nat knew she could leave. Knew she had to leave.