Letty stared at the text, then deleted it without a response. She’d already disabled the GPS on her phone. She’d been debating getting rid of it, buying one of those cheap burner phones they sold in convenience stores, but she wasn’t ready to give up the lifeline her phone represented. Yet. She switched it off and willed herself back to sleep.

We’re safe, she thought. Nobody would look for them in this out-of-the-way town. She had been careful not to leave any tracks that could lead Evan to a place like the Murmuring Surf. The door was locked, the dead bolt engaged. Tanya’s go-bag, with the money and the ring, was hidden away. They were hidden, too. Maya was safe. She stroked the little girl’s curls, and listened to the reassuring sound of the child contentedly sucking on her thumb.

True, there was a cop sniffing around, asking prying questions. But Letty had questions of her own, so she intended to stay put and stay vigilant.

Letty still didn’t know how much her niece understood about what had happened to her mother, or how much she’d witnessed. Her prayer was that Maya had slept through Tanya’s violent murder, because she couldn’t bear to think about the alternative. At some point, she thought, she would need to get Maya counseling.

Tomorrow, Letty vowed, she would make a plan. Start thinking about finding a job and a better place to live. A ratty motel room was no place to raise a child. Was that what she was going to be doing now? Raising a child? It was a deeply unsettling idea. Letty had always harbored some vague notion that someday she would have the normal things that normal people had: a career, a stable marriage, a mortgage, a dog, and yes, even a child of her own. Preferably in that precise order.

But there was nothing normal about her life on the run.

She was waiting tables at a diner in Tribeca, sharing a crappy apartment in Queens with three other girls she’d met through a Craigslist ad. Evan was a regular customer. He had the kind of looks that, if you passed him on the street, you’d turn around and take another look. He was on the short side, yeah, maybe five foot ten, but he had these arresting amber-colored eyes, a square jaw, hair with the beginnings of a silver streak.

He was a regular customer at the diner, always sat alone at table 2, in the window, dressed casually in fashionable designer jeans, and a heavily starched dress shirt, Gucci loafers, no socks; the only jewelry a wristwatch and heavy gold signet ring on his right hand.

Although he frequently had business meetings, with clients filtering in and out over the space of a couple hours, it hadn’t gone unnoticed that Table Two, as the girls all called him, was rarely joined by a woman.