She leaned over her desk, pointing a finger up in the air. “That’s a sample of one, Jean. One. You know more about statistics than to hang your hat on a single subject.”

Lin was right and wrong at the same time. My neighbor Olivia was an outlier, but she was an outlier only here in Washington. What Lin didn’t consider—what none of us considered—was how much of a bubble our city was, how different from the rest of the country with its bearded duck people and Christian communities cropping up like weeds. There was a documentary about one of those places, Glorytown or Gloryville or something like that, where all the women wore pretty blue dresses with high collars and followed special diets and milked cows. The director, when interviewed, had called it “neat.”

Jackie had made the bubble reference first, that snide remark about me in my safe little lab, and followed it with an unhappy-birthday-to-you basket of things that went pop: bubble gum, balloons, sparkling wine. She asked me—it seems like a million years ago now—to think about what I would do to stay free.

What would I do?

Lorenzo has something cooking, I know. Something that costs quite a bit of money, more than he would have stashed away as a wandering academic. I don’t dare raise my hopes that it’s a ticket out of here, a stolen passport, anything like that. But I’m thinking exactly those things as I drive up our street past Annie Wilson’s old house, now inhabited by one man and one boy while Annie works long hours in some no-man’s-land.

Extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary actions.

“Mommy, look!” Sonia chirps. “More lights!”

We’re even with the Kings’ house now, and this time, the ambulance is really an ambulance.

Chapter Forty-five

FORTY-FIVE

Julia King wasn’t the first girl to find herself a victim of Reverend Carl’s fornication police, and Olivia wasn’t the first mother who watched her child being taken away in the middle of the night, only to reappear, transformed, on television the following day.

Nor was Olivia the first woman to try her own way out.

I’ve seen them in Safeway, the regular customers who disappear for a while and come back in a week, a little dopey in the eyes, the bandages on their wrists peeking out from long sleeves when they reach to a high shelf for that elusive can of peas or chicken soup.

And there have been funerals, of course, not all of them for old men and women who died of natural causes.