“Is she hungry?” Claudia asked, looking back. Edie and Nathan were sitting on either side of Lydia in her car seat in the SUV’s third row. Claudia and her parents took up the seat in the car’s middle. Mom and dad and daughter. Mom and dad and daughter. For the past hour she’d been watching her niece sleep in the window’s reflection. She couldn’t stop staring. What horrible things awaited this little girl? What people would cut her low? What people would fail her? What moments would define her? What mistakes would she carry forever? Did she have any control at all? Did anyone?

In the living room Edie plopped down, unhooked her tank top, and wrestled the wailing child across her chest.

“Smell that?” asked Michelle, setting her purse on the breakfront. “I think she needs to be changed.”

“There’s wipes right here,” said Gabe.

Claudia watched her family mobilize around Edie and the baby. When was the last time they were even together in the house? When Lydia finally quieted there was silence, and they all turned toward her.

“Are you hungry?” asked her dad.

“No.”

“Tired?”

Claudia nodded.

“What can we do?” asked her mom, stepping toward her.

“I don’t know,” said Claudia.

“Get some sleep,” said her dad. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Upstairs she took pajamas from her bureau, changed her clothes, and went into the bathroom she and Edie had shared for the past decade. It was just as Claudia had left it the last time she was here, a few days before spring break started. Her face wash and her lotions and her toothbrush evenly spaced on the marble countertop; dried eucalyptus in the ceramic vase she’d made in elementary school; thick gray towels, tastefully mismatched glass pulls on all the drawers; every stray hair or stain wiped away by Valeria, the woman whose job it was to make every surface in their house look beautiful all the time. But nobody could wipe away what had changed on the face she saw in the mirror. Her eye and lip were almost completely healed, just the faintest blue shadow remained on her eyelid, but what she saw when she met her own eyes was someone who had never been in this house before. A stranger to everyone but herself.

TREVOR

Claudia’s family had come and gone, he was told.

“She’s been hiding out in one of their other houses,” said Officer Cross when he brought Trevor a tray for dinner.

“She’s okay?” he asked.

Cross shrugged. “Apparently.”

The relief was delicious: He hadn’t gotten her killed. He hadn’t driven her to suicide. It was all going to be over soon. Claudia would explain that they’d had a plan to meet at her house and the cops would let him go and he’d be back at the dorm by tomorrow.