“It’s okay.” The relief he felt at the sound of her voice was breathtaking. He couldn’t help how much he wanted her. He wanted her more than he wanted twenty thousand dollars. They were going to get through this together. “Did you talk to Ridley?”

“Who?” asked Claudia.

“Chad’s dad.”

“What are you talking about? Where are you?”

“Forty-Second Street.”

“I’m in a hotel on Forty-Fourth. The Towers in Times Square. There’s a Bubba Gump on the corner. Room 1492.”

Sailed the ocean blue, he thought as he began walking. He had only gone half a block when the man ran into him, snatched his phone, pushed him toward the street, and disappeared into the crowd.

CLAUDIA

“What should we do?” asked Trevor after he’d told her about his encounters with Chad and Ridley.

“We?”

“Those assholes came after me, too.”

Claudia was ready with her answer: “I have to assume that video is going to get out. When it does, the story isn’t going to be: Claudia Castro is a slut. The story is going to be: The guys who fucked with Claudia Castro got fucked up.”

“I want to help you.”

They decided that step one was to get Claudia out of the hotel, where she was registered under her name. Whatever was going to happen next had to happen with a minimal footprint. She’d turned on her phone on that morning and deleted all the social apps. Texts were mostly from Trevor and her mom. Mom requesting a “family meeting”; Mom saying Edie “needs her sister.” They were easy to ignore. But after what had happened to Trevor’s phone, Claudia realized that having hers on made her vulnerable to GPS tracking. Ridley had his lawyer fingers in with all kinds of hackers. Chad once told her that was how his dad got a better deal in the divorce: He got into Chad’s mom’s phone and got proof she’d been having an affair, too. She paid up rather than look like a slut, Chad said. How could she have ever thought they were friends? The whole time, he just wanted to shove himself into her. To make her his.

She and Trevor went downstairs to the hotel’s business office to use the Internet. A few clicks and they found an open room at a Holiday Inn on Ninth Avenue. Her fake ID said she was Ingrid Greggs twenty-two, of Yonkers, and she figured that with enough cash up front, she could convince the desk clerk to overlook a “lost” credit card.

Step two was the bank.

“I’m gonna run some errands,” she told Trevor. “Meet me at the hotel in an hour?”

He didn’t make her explain further.