There were no cameras allowed in the courtroom; all media was banned. But they couldn’t ban the defendants from the courtroom—they couldn’t ban Bobby from seeing his wife, from hearing everything she had to say. They couldn’t ban Sherri’s heart from breaking anew at the start of each of the eleven days. Four defendants, one trial. Four convictions, four sentences. One protected government witness.

And then Sharon and Katie Giordano disappeared forever and ever.

What Sherri remembered most about the time they spent preparing for their new lives was the bathroom in the room that she and Katie shared, in a dingy motel in an “undisclosed location.” She couldn’t disclose it now even if she wanted to because she didn’t know where it was.

All these motels look the same: a rutted parking lot, a row of doors with two plastic chairs set outside each, a front office that smelled like old French fries, a chain-link fence surrounding an underutilized pool. The toilet ran unless you jiggled the handle, and there was a rust stain in the tub. Bobby would never, ever, ever have taken Sherri to a motel like this. Or any motel.

Sometimes, when Katie was sleeping, Sherri went into the terrible bathroom and sat on the toilet seat and looked at the rust stain in the tub and cried and cried for everything they’d lost.

They lost so much. The money, of course. Their social security numbers. They got new ones, but they were hard to memorize and Sherri still had to look hers up anytime she needed them. Their last name, although Katie got to keep her first name and they both retained the G from their last names. They altered Katie’s school records to reflect attendance at a different school, essentially rewriting her past.

In the motel room they made Katie write her new name again and again and again. Katie Griffin Katie Griffin Katie Griffin. Sherri practiced hers too. Slipups could be deadly. They role-played meeting new people and introducing themselves. They practiced what was called “cocktail party conversation.”

What Sherri was supposed to say at a cocktail party was that she and Katie moved from Ohio after a nasty divorce. Then she was supposed to gracefully change the subject, but if anybody pressed her she had the details ready to go. (Columbus; Bobby took up with a woman at his office; they lived in a neighborhood called Livingston Park on a street called Carpenter Street; their house was made of redbrick.)

During those hours and days and weeks in the motel they wrapped their minds around the fact that they were taking nothing from their old lives with them, not the photo album from Bobby and Sherri’s wedding, not the phenomenal drawing of a dinosaur that Katie did in second grade that Sherri had framed and hung in the kitchen near her calendar. Not the calendar either. They simply walked away from everything.