They adopted Megan as a small child. She was vibrant, cute, and smart. Had come from a broken home—an alcoholic father and mother who didn’t want a child. Meanwhile, Jack was out dining on Kobe beefsteaks and expensive whiskey. Getting little sleep. Following expense reports, business trends. Staying ahead of the game. Sarah was giving up her dreams of becoming a lawyer to be a good mother. Jack never paid attention to the trends in his own family. How his adopted daughter’s earlier abuse had damaged something deep inside her. So many things he missed. Warning signs that would lead to Megan hanging in her cell after the trial. And to his son rebelling by turning down a topflight business school for a trade school, then becoming addicted to cocaine, meth, and booze. And his wife was becoming tired more often, and Jack thinking it was from everything she had to deal with. Then his mother’s age just sort of sneaked up on him. The strong, fearless woman who had raised him, going into that hospital to die and telling Jack to “run, run away from it all.” Processing it all, he realizes he never really knew his children—he only paid for them, for their habits, their luxuries.

His shoulders are already sore from the pack straps, and his feet sting and burn with every step. What he would give to sit in a vehicle with an air conditioner! Even a beat-up truck and a rolled-down window. Anything other than walking under a brutal sun. He had decided on South America because he told himself he needed to get away from everything. Everyone. A change of scenery. Well, this certainly qualifies. He looks out at the barren landscape. An excursion to clear his mind, rebuild his soul. To run, run away from it all. To figure things out and, just perhaps, discover something within himself. But he has no good idea what that might be.

Fabiola’s words ring loud and clear in his head. You ran away from a world that you controlled. Because you couldn’t control what you had lost. And that’s when Jack hears the sound of tires on hard dirt, and the Doppler swoosh of a vehicle passing from behind.

ANNE

ANNE

Voices come from all directions, bouncing through the silent maze of boxcars, tankers, grainers, and flatcars, mixed and matched, coupled in rows on several tracks. Crunch of ballast stone beneath their feet. Anne is a ball of anxious worry as Cinnamon yells, “This way! Hurry!”