But there was no happily ever after. Six months after taking Katie in, Martha Pinter died of a heart attack, and things went quickly south. Dr. Pinter began to have episodes of what would later be described as dementia. Local police were called a half dozen times, finding him wandering in the neighbors’ yards, or stumbling along the side of a nearby highway. Child services began to get involved. Then one morning, Dr. Pinter was picked up on a freezing winter day, in a field two miles from his home, half-dead from hypothermia. A judge decreed that he needed to become a ward of the state. Katie was going to have to be moved again, placed with a new family.

And that’s when the next tragedy struck. When child services arrived at the Pinter home to pick up Katie, they found the house engulfed in flames.

Zack had read through the file from the Fitchburg Fire Department, who had been called in when the fire had grown too large for the local crew. According to forensics, the fire had started in the old man’s workshop; apparently, a crystalized stone called pyrite, used in the workings of the doctor’s antique radios, had set off the blaze. It turned out pyrite could be highly flammable, under the right circumstances.

At the time, it was never clear what had happened to the girl, whether Katie had died in the fire or run away as the flames swallowed up the house. At first, she’d been listed as a missing person, but as time passed and no sign of her materialized, she’d been forgotten, like the hundreds of other untethered kids her age who disappear every year. Technically, her file was still open, but nobody had been looking for Katie for a long, long time.

Hailey Gordon’s file, at least the one kept at the admissions office at MIT, where she’d attended as an undergrad and was now a graduate student, was much more pleasant reading. She had written her own story there, and it was a good one. Zack had always enjoyed fiction over nonfiction. In fiction, the story went wherever the author chose to take it.

A con artist of a familiar kind, yes, but Hailey Gordon was also plainly a genius. Faking an identity, let alone a high school record, good enough to get her into MIT was a feat in itself; succeeding at such an elite university, and surviving this long on her own was even more impressive. According to the roommate, Hailey had usually paid her rent and bills in cash, and though she was often late, she had never missed two months in a row.

Card counting, odd jobs, petty schemes—however Hailey had done it, she’d managed pretty well. She’d focused on her studies, stayed under the radar—until now.